Quite unexpectedly, there's not just one winner of the inaugural Linden Prize, there's two. Last week, we covered the finalists (and a pretty worthy bunch at that). Today, the Lab is handing out a pair of Linden Prizes. Each of the winners receives Linden Dollars to the value of US$10,000.
The Linden Prize itself is open to Second Life users and organizations who have an innovative in-world project that improves the way people work, learn and communicate in their daily lives outside of the virtual world and who are willing to participate in Linden Lab marketing efforts.
And the winners are...
Virtual Ability
Offering a series of courses and resources to help people with real-world disabilities get acclimated and start using Second Life, Virtual Ability helps realize the documented medical and psychological benefits offered by virtual environments.
The organization has developed a unique orientation process that assesses individual skills, provides customized training and makes recommendations for assistive hardware as needed. Once users are comfortable in the virtual world, Virtual Ability offers a series of daily field trips, including everything from mountain climbs, skydiving, fishing, dancing, and countless other activities that are difficult or impossible in the real world.
Virtual Ability is seven kinds of dedicated awesomeness, and was our personal favorite to take the prize. A disproportionate number of Second Life users have some form of physical disablement, and Virtual Ability provides community and assistance where required, while also supporting high-quality disability research.
Studio Wikitecture
Studio Wikitecture explores how a geographically dispersed design team can simultaneously work on the same architecture or urban planning project. This includes sharing ideas, editing the contributions of others and voting on the success or failure of proposed design iterations.
To help guide and manage collaboration effectively, Studio Wikitecture built a version tracking Wiki that it calls the "Wiki-Tree." Unlike conventional wikis that track text documents in a linear history, Wiki-Tree tracks versions of 3D models and saves them within a continually evolving digital tree structure.
Studio Wikitecture's most recent major project saw a number of different participants from varying disciplines come together and collaborate on the design of a tele-medicine health clinic in one of the more remote parts of Nepal which beat 565 other entries to win the Founder's Award in the AMD Open Architecture Challenge.
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