Jim Pubrick, a developer at Linden Labs, developed Carbon Goggles, allowing users to see the real-life carbon footprint of virtual objects – like cars and airplanes – in Second Life.

Pop!Tech reports that the motivation behind the project is to provide a real visual sense of the carbon emissions of a given object without having to look at spreadsheets.

Here’s the video, taken after a 24-hour software programming craze at Mashed08 in London:

Carbon Goggles from Jim Purbrick on Vimeo.

Carbon Goggles gives an almost-exact measure of an items carbon footprint. Check out the accompanying Web site for a list of objects whose carbon measurement can be found in SL.