The official Microsoft Gamerscore Blog explains in greater detail how Themes will affect the new interface. In short, Themes add active, animated backgrounds to the pseudo-3D spaces on screen in the dashboard's various "channels."

Today's new screenshots illustrate those effects on the Friends Channel, where players can see who of their friends are online by looking at which Avatars are on-screen instead of having to check a list.

The blog post added that Themes purchased for the current Xbox dashboard have been upgraded to suit the new scheme. As an example, a Gears of War theme is pictured above.

Blake's Take: There's plenty of chatter about whether Microsoft cribbed its Avatars from Nintendo's Miis, but before anybody starts complaining, I think Microsoft should not be slammed for "stealing" the word Channel from Nintendo. With every generation, gaming acquires a few new words for its vocabulary and "channel" is a perfectly good way to describe a user interface element common to every system. Besides, nobody from our industry should have to answer to television for "stealing" what was once their word.