The New Xbox Experience is now live. And very impressive it is too. That is my new Mii^W^W^W sorry, avatar, on the left.

The whole update just oozes polish. Very much in the style of Apple with panes swooshing all over the place, and CD-rack style collections of games and options. The opening movie seems designed to say, “Yes, well, Nintendo did the cute avatars first, but check THIS out”.

The avatars are stunningly put together and animated. Lots of cute little touches like headbutting the screen should you rotate them back then forward again. And of course they wave and generally dash about. It will be very interesting when more games start to take advantage of them.

I tried out the “Install game to hard disk” feature with Fallout 3. Painless, and although there wasn’t a huge increase in speed afterwads, I could play the game without the aircraft taking off DVD drive noises. Excellent.

Of course, now I have pretty much zero hard disk space, so the 120 Gb Hard Drive Expansion is looking mighty appealing. Predictably, Amazon are sold out now.

It’s fantastic to see Yet Another Cool Thing created using the Nintendo Wii hardware:

Since the Wiimote can track sources of infrared (IR) light, you can track pens that have an IR led in the tip. By pointing a wiimote at a projection screen or LCD display, you can create very low-cost interactive whiteboards or tablet displays. Since the Wiimote can track upto 4 points, multiple pens can be used.

Blog announcement.

More detailed information, and other cool Wii projects.