SL5B Birthday Main Stage -Linden Lab Board member Mitch Kapor announced today that Second Life will have better interoperability with an improved avatar mesh and motion sensing cameras in the future.

Kapor made the closing keynote address at the Second Life Fifth Birthday celebration at the SL5B Main Stage to a packed audience.

Kapor also announced the development of the Linden Prize, "an annual award for superlative achievement exemplifying the mission "elevating the human condition" through using Second Life."

 The Linden Award is a cash award for individuals or organizations.  The prize of $10k USD will be paid in Linden dollars and will be decided upon by a group of Lindens and residents jointly every year.

Kapor's keynote focused on the evolution of virtual worlds, specifically Second Life, where he compared adoption and growth by residents as the early wild west of U.S. history. Calling early adopters of Second Life the pioneers, he posited that the next stage of development for Second Life will be opening up to a larger population and making SL easier to use. The next stage, one of pragmatism, he announced, is upon us.

The announcement had been highly anticipated by residents for several weeks since it was forshadowed in the official Linden Lab blog.

Kapor showed two videos of early research around avatar manipulation, one demonstrating better facial expressions and one showing avatar movement controlled by human movement via a camera being developed in Japan. He explained both innovations were in the very early stages of development, but said that Second Life users would see them in use in the future.

Kapor, known for being at the forefront of early internet development, is the founding investor and Board Chair for Second Life, the developer of Lotus Development Corporation, the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, founding investor of UUNET; co-founder of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, founding investor of Real Networks, and Founding Chair of Mozilla.