Microsoft plans to release a new, more powerful Xbox One for the 2017 holiday season, promising 4K game graphics, VR support, and full backward compatibility. And where Sony has gone with a Matrix vibe in codenaming its Playstation-related products, Microsoft is going decidedly astrological: "Project Scorpio."

Scorpio, Microsoft said at its E3 media briefing in Los Angeles on Monday morning, won't be like the leap from Xbox 360 to Xbox One, where you start over again from scratch with a new machine and new game library. Games will be compatible with your current Xbox One and the more powerful model; they'll just be rendered with greater graphical fidelity on Scorpio thanks to its 6-teraflop GPU and 8-core processor. Your existing accessories, too, will work on Scorpio.

This wasn't the only new piece of hardware Microsoft showed at its conference. The Xbox One S is a smaller version of the current Xbox One with some marginal upgrades like 4K video playback (but not 4K games). That'll be out this August.

Sony, too, has said it plans to release an upgraded PlayStation 4, codenamed "Neo," but it won't show it at its E3 press conference later today.

The piece of the Scorpio plan that hasn't quite been spelled out yet is virtual reality. Microsoft made specific mention that VR would be a significant part of Scorpio, and Bethesda's Todd Howard appeared in a video played at the conference to note that the developer's VR version of Fallout 4 would come to Scorpio.

But what VR headset, or headsets, might one plug in to Project Scorpio? Rift? Vive? A headset of Microsoft's own design, perhaps? It didn't say.

Microsoft's angle, as it said Monday morning, is not "forcing gamers to abandon" the current Xbox One. If you want to keep playing the box you already have (or the S model it'll release shortly), you'll still be able to play the latest games on it. For those who have to have the latest and greatest, Scorpio will be there.

In other words, consoles are shifting to a phone-like upgrade model. Are you ready?