Second Life to Pay $10,000 for Improvement of Real Life

There’s an interesting announcement on the blog of Second Life, probably still the best-known and the most popular virtual reality project. Today the team is announcing Linden Prize, a contest with the $10,000 in prize money to be paid to a member or a team of Second Life residents for the most innovative inworld project that will improve real lives outside of the virtual world.

The applications are accepted starting today so if you already have an inworld project that you think will meet the requirements of the contest you may send the application right away. But bright ideas without implementations are not too much of an obstacle as the applications will be accepted until mid-January so Second Life users still have time to turn their ideas into reality… well, virtual reality.

The winner will be announced by the jury until the end of April. The prize of $10,000 will be paid to the winner in Linden dollars (the currency used in Second Life by its residents to buy products or services from each other) so it will be impossible to spend the money on something not available in the virtual reality.

I guess one of the motivations behind the Linden Prize award for the Second Life team is to prove to the world that people spending significant part of their waking hours online in the virtual reality do not actually waste their time and can create something really useful - useful enough to influence the way we work or communicate in our real lives.

Of course there already are tons of projects that exist in the virtual reality but can potentially have impact on the real life, like virtual scientific research or numerous virtual businesses generating real profits to real people. So the award announced today is intended to select the most innovative project of all and reward it to recognize the impact of the virtual reality has on the real world. It will certainly be very interesting to see which projects are considered to have the most impact on our real lives and hopefully the goal of proving virtual reality can be a good and actually useful supplement to the real one will be achieved.