Yesterday, crayon client Coca-Cola launched Virtual Thirst, a competition to design a new generation of Coke vending machines.

This is a competition with a big difference, though, as it’s about imagining a device that would dispense experiences, not metal cans or plastic bottles. Those experiences would happen in the virtual world of Second Life.

The contest was officially launched on crayonville Island with a virtual press event during which Coke execs outlined the competition and answered questions from an invited audience of mainstream media reporters, bloggers and podcasters. See the official announcement in the social media press release.

There were two such events, in fact, in order to enable people in different parts of the world to participate. Both events were recorded and MP3 audios of both are now available from the Virtual Thirst website.

If you wanted to enter the contest – open to anyone – what’s the kind of experience you could imagine?

Here’s an idea:

That’s me, dancing inside a Coke bottle. A great audio-visual experience! There are already more photos on Flickr, taken by my crayon colleagues CC Chapman and Lynette Young.

This is one of the three prototype devices built by the very talented people at Millions of Us, our partner in this project with Coca-Cola, to illustrate what can happen when you let your imagination run free.

So let your own imagination run free. If you want to enter the contest, do. Multiple ways to enter as explained on the contest website.

[Edit] An important correction. The prototypes were actually built by three young freelance builders – Zee Kaos, Audio Zenith and Latok Neumann (their avatar names) – not Millions of Us.

[Update Apr 18] Uploaded a bunch of event photos I took to Flickr to join lots more at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/virtualthirst/.

And check out this really great video of the launch created by SLObserver – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRjIVeATswQ.

[Technorati: Virtual Thirst]