Avatar

Xbox Avatars are avatars and characters that represent users of the Xbox Live service on the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X and Series S video game consoles, Windows 10, and Windows 10 Mobile. Avatars originally debuted on the Xbox 360 as part of the "New Xbox Experience" system update released on November 19, 2008, updated on Xbox One with "New Xbox One Experience" Xbox One System Software on November 12, 2015, and reimagined with the release of the next generation character for Xbox One on October 11, 2018.

The Next generation
On June 13, 2017, during E3 2017, Microsoft announced a complete overhaul of the Avatars, providing a much greater emphasis of customization and inclusiveness, especially by adding limb customization, clothing that supported all characters – as the old system had different clothing for male and female body types – and support for changing asset color at runtime. Other customization includes cloth and hair that are impacted by physics, fourteen different body types with 20 height options, and Moods and Props that are never "put away" when displaying an Avatar. The new Avatar system was delayed originally slated to release in the Fall 2017 but continued to be active in development through 2018. On June 18, 2018, the Xbox Avatar Editor beta – leveraging the Unity rendering engine – arrived to Xbox Insiders, then on August 8, Microsoft released a Q&A on some of the ways how the new Avatars will be displayed on the Xbox One Dashboard, and as of August 16, the new Avatar Xbox Editor beta arrived for Windows 10 testers. and were officially released for all Xbox Live users on October 11, 2018.

The Older Generation
Xbox 360 users are able to customize body shape, sex, facial features, hair style, clothing, and "props". They can then display a 2D picture of their Avatar on their Gamercard (although they are still free to use their previous picture should they so choose). Xbox Live GM Ben Kilgore stated in 2008 that Avatars will only be available for games that have an E10+ rating or lower only (featuring content that is considered suitable for children under 10 years of age). This may change sometime in the future, though presumably in Microsoft's own games if it ever happens, to monitor their usage in mature games. It was announced at Game Developers Conference on March 24, 2009 that the XNA framework 3.1 would have an API to support Avatars in indie games. With the release of Windows 10 and the New Xbox One Experience, the rendering of the Avatars has been changed to offer a higher quality of rendering across different devices.

Users can edit their current avatar using the Xbox Original Avatars application on an Xbox console, Windows 10 or Windows 10 Mobiledevice or by using the Microsoft Silverlight based editor on Xbox.com. Across all of these experiences, users will have access to their entire closet of items that they've purchased or have been awarded throughout the Xbox ecosystem.

Trivia

 * The new generation Characters for Xbox live Player released in October of 2018.