40 Days #35: Turn the dashboard into a videoconferencing powerhouse

A common complaint about the Xbox 360 dashboard is the lack of the multi-person chats that were available on the original Xbox. Microsoft says it comes down to how the available bandwidth is allocated. Despite assurances that the Xbox team is "listening", nothing much has changed since the launch of the console. This has led to pretty sad how-to articles like this one, which describes how to use Xbox Live to provide chat capability for Super Smash Bros. Brawl - with the caveat that you actually need a game like Halo 3 to establish a multi-person chat environment.

I can sort of understand the decision to restrict the dashboard's chat bandwidth to make sure game performance doesn't get completely throttled. However, this is a feature that many gamers keep passionately demanding, so Microsoft needs to find a way around their own limitations.

One way Microsoft could easily follow its own decision would be to create a new "game" for this purpose. Just write a separate app that gets launched from the dashboard, and all it does is provide a top-notch video and audio conferencing environment. Make it an attractive and user-friendly cross between Apple's iChat and ooVoo, with lots of goofy video effects, good audio and video quality, support for at least four simultaneous users, and extra features like perhaps recording/storing/sharing clips of these chats.

Existing games already support multiple people with cameras, so bandwidth itself certainly isn't an issue. And the 360 has enough horsepower to render an attractively laid out interface to hold a conference with other gamers. This is one of those features you want to pitch as a way for geographically dispersed families and friends to stay in touch, especially around holidays.

This feature would essentially be like a souped-up Spyglass Board Games - without the board games, and also free, and part of the dashboard. There should also be full friend-list integration, so that you can easily select and invite multiple people to a chat quickly. Add to that capability to "nudge" (vibrate) other participants' controllers, and an area for text chat support so that you could bring in people connected over Live Messenger, and you have a nicely rounded conversation client. A really technically impressive solution would also go for cross-platform audio/video integration with Live Messenger clients. That would you could use the Xbox 360 to communicate with just about anybody.

I would even be curious to see how many communication features are supported in the XNA framework - could somebody actually write an app like this for distribution as a community "game"? At any rate, after over two years of user requests, Microsoft needs to step up and provide some sort of reasonable multi-person chat solution.