Last year, the New Xbox Experience introduced fully customizable avatars to Xbox Live players. With those avatars, came the attendant thought that Microsoft might be prepping an entry point into virtual worlds, with one exec going so far as to tell VirtualWorldsNews, "We’re thinking about the [virtual worlds] space heavily and have been involved in a gaming aspect for quite some time."

But that was 2008.

Which is why all eyes were on Microsoft at this year's annual E3 Expo trade show. And while recent comments from Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten don't exactly point to a virtual worlds launch from the company, they do fuel continued speculation.

"I will say from my perspective, Avatars have just been an amazing success," Whitten said in a post-E3 interview with gameindustry.biz. "One of the things that we've seen is something like 100 million changes of clothing since we launched Avatars…So it's something we see our audience doing a ton of."

But is the uptake of avatars a big enough blip to encourage the company to make the jump into virtual worlds? Maybe.

"You'll continue to see us adding on to that with many of the other experiences coming in the fall. We're hard at work on a long roadmap of stuff over the next year," Whitten said.

The original 2008 video introducing avatars to Xbox Live is below. And below that, a video of Microsoft's E3 presentation from last week, of Project Natal, something many feel has even greater application to Microsoft's entry into virtual worlds than its avatar initiative (introduced by game designer Peter Molyneux).