In Drupal Commerce 1.x, we used the Commerce Fancy Attributes and Field Extractor modules to render attributes more dynamically than just using simple select lists. This let you do things like show a color swatch instead of just a color name for a customer to select.

Fancy Attributes on a product display in Commerce Kickstart 2.x.

In Commerce 2.0-alpha4, we introduced specific product attribute related entity types. Building on top of them and other contributed modules, we can now provide fancy attributes out of the box! When presenting the attribute dropdown, we show the labels of attribute values. But since attribute values are fieldable, we can just as easily use a different field to represent it, such as an image or a color field. To accomplish this, we provide a new element type that renders the attribute value entities as a radio button option.

Read more to see an example configuration.