LOS ANGELES — Remember how we were all supposed to do all our real-world shopping in virtual malls and hold our business meetings in virtual offices by now?

Despite the ups and downs of highly detailed 3-D virtual worlds like Second Life, Kaneva and There.com, that never really happened.

But you or your kid can buy a stuffed unicorn, and then go online and prance it around in the virtual worlds run by Webkinz, like more than a million other users do each month. And you can join a crew of 5.5 million virtual pirates created by users on Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” site.

Maybe virtual worlds were really all about kids and games after all.

“If you look at the market today, 90 percent-plus of the activity is going on with kids,” Barry Gilbert, an analyst with tech industry research firm Strategy Analytics, said at an industry conference here last week sponsored by Austin, Texas-based Virtual Worlds Management.

Beginning today, when the highly anticipated video game called Spore hits the market in North America, you can even build a virtual universe populated with creatures from the smallest of protozoa to the oddest of six-eyed giants that must survive through five stages of evolution.

Link up over the Internet with other Spore fans worldwide, and Darwin’s survival of the fittest becomes as realistic as virtually possible. Already you can slide around on ice with virtual friends at “Club Penguin.” Or turn yourself into an avatar fairy in Disney’s forthcoming “Pixie Hollow” virtual world.

In the future, Gilbert said, “it’s (still) going to be all about kids and virtual worlds that come with gaming attributes in them.”

While sites like Second Life were getting more than their share of attention a few years ago, more than 150 virtual world sites focused on the 18-and-younger youth market sprang up, according to research from Virtual Worlds Management.

Tie-ins with movies like “Pirates of the Caribbean” or stuffed animals like Webkinz are just the start.

At Virtual Worlds Expo here, Irwin Toys showed off Me2, a new virtual gaming device that any health-conscious parent could love. Essentially, Me2 is a pedometer that kids can wear during the day and plug into a virtual-world game at night. The amount of “energy” they have to play in the virtual world depends on how much they walked in the real world during the day.

Toymaker Hasbro showed off some of its latest Littlest Pet Shop VIPs (Virtual Interactive Pets) that kids can play with in the real world and also in a virtual world online.

Others announced online virtual worlds and games tied to make-believe dinosaurs, the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and the Disney film “Cars.”

In the future, there may be little differences between virtual worlds, video games and social networks, predicted Michael Cai, an analyst with Parks Associates in Dallas.

“We’re obviously seeing a lot of convergence of them all already,” he said.

Kids and games may rule for now, but Second Life and virtual worlds like it are still very much alive and kicking, said GinsuYoon, vice president of business affairs for Second Life creator Linden Lab. “Frankly, (kids and games) are just the flavor of the month,” he said.

Yoon is quick to point out that Second Life is a profitable business that’s been around for about six years. It has nearly 15 million registered “residents” who can build houses, buy land and trade goods worth millions in real-world dollars every month.

But Yoon also acknowledged Second Life is nothing like it was — or what some people expected it would become.

Many companies that invested real money in advertising and online virtual stores on Second Life have pulled the plug. Users who once logged on daily have now found something else to do with their time and money.

Dell Inc., for instance, created “Dell Island” on Second Life in November 2006 with high expectations that visitors would go there to meet other Dell users, catch up on company news and — most importantly — buy new computers and equipment.

But while the island was created to host 400 avatars, it sometimes has no visitors.

A year or so, Dell gave up trying to sell computers on “Dell Island” because it wasn’t worth the cost or trouble to do so, said Laura Thomas, who is responsible for the computer maker’s virtual world programs.

Thomas said she hasn’t given up on the idea. After all, today’s Webkinz and Club Penguin kids will grow up someday fully expecting to be able to buy goods through virtual worlds, she said.

But for now, she and Dell are beginning to face up to the realities of virtual worlds.

“We’ve had a whole lot of hype,” Thomas said, “but we’re still way, way early.”

Focused

on

the

kids

More than 150 virtual world Web sites for the youth market have sprung up in the past few years, and it’s estimated that more than 90 percent of the activity in this “virtual market” is carried out by children.