Linden Lab is on a “benefit reality” thing, lately – it’s in keeping with their mission, I guess, to improve humanity, although I figure they should leave that until they’ve benefited the first hour, or stopped my viewer from crashing every 30 minutes (why was I crash free for 6 months and now I crash every ten minutes? Time to use Imprudence I guess).

Philip has been waxing philosophical about the virtues of, um, electricity. And the Lab has been supporting research at MIT in which a bridge between the virtual and the real can pump life into what the head researcher calls the waning fascination with virtual worlds.

It’s a few weeks old, I guess, but Forbes recently reported on Joe Paradiso, a professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, who is one such proponent of this idea.

Paradiso and his seven PhD students are creating X-Reality, or Cross Reality, a model that hopes to bridge the divide between virtual and real worlds using sensors, displays and software to, as Forbes writes, “bring real-world data into virtual worlds and to integrate access to virtual worlds with real-world situations.” This image gives somewhat of an idea of the plan:

The team’s first plan is to set up 45 PDA-sized devices around the Media Lab building. Anyone with a small electronic badge can walk up to these devices and access Second Life. From the other side of things, Second Life users can peer out on those looking in at them.

“These devices are designed to be like wormholes that let you tunnel through to a second reality,” Paradiso told Forbes. “Second Life is detached. We’re tying it into the real world.”

These nodes seem to be the backbone of Paradiso’s plans, and as he said, “we’re just extending human perception through these nodes. We’re funneling bits back and forth to the virtual world.”

Paradiso’s work also builds on the work of previous PhD student Josh Lifton, who had set up power strips and sensors to play with the VW/RW interactions. Lifton now works for Electric Sheep, developing a dual-world commercial toy product that he calls a robot that “remembers” its SL experiences. This type of data integration has also been tried by IBM, when they mapped the data center of Implenia by building the information into a 3D VW model.

In the article, Paradiso perhaps gets in the last (or first) word on the impact that these dual world advancements are having.

“Everyone’s fascinated with virtual worlds, but they’re starting to get a bit tired,” he says to Forbes. “How you tie the virtual world into the real–not necessarily one or the other, but a whole continuum, a layered immersion–that’s an intriguing story.”