Many Xbox gamers know of the upcoming “New Xbox Experience” (NXE) that’ll be hitting next month on the 19th. Among other new features included with this update, you’ll be able to create your very own Mii’s Avatars to represent yourself online.
It appears that some of these Avatars have begun to appear in the wild, and there’s a possibility that Microsoft may have something in the works social network-wise for these little guys. Each gamertag has a URL that can be used to load a PNG of your Avatar, which I’d imagine is for use on blogs, forum avatars, Twitter, etc. However, if you try visiting these URLs in your browser (except for IE) you’ll just receive a bunch of text, and won’t be able to view the Avatar image, unless you download and save the contents of the URL as a .png file.
I wanted to check out some of these Avatars, and since saving and loading each URL was a bit tedious, I decided to build a quick & dirty Flex app to load the various Avatar images. (Much faster, right?)
Here’s the app: http://blog.joshbuhler.com/flash/360avatars/
You can either select from a list of known Gamertags that already have Avatars, or enter in a Gamertag of your choice. Though, if the Gamertag doesn’t have an Avatar yet, the image won’t load.
(By the way, the skin for the app is the slick Undefined by Alberto Alcaraz, winner of ScaleNine’s Skin to Win Challenge.)
