• Austin American-Statesman , Monday, September 8, 2008 9:31 AM

Although highly detailed 3-D worlds such as Second Life, There.com and Kaneva haven't lived up to the initial hype among adults, it appears that virtual worlds may really have been about kids and games after all. While sites such as 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-under youth market sprang up, according to research from Virtual Worlds Management.

You or your kid can buy a stuffed unicorn, and then go online and pretend to prance it around in the virtual worlds run by Webkinz, like more than a million other users do each month. Or you can join a crew of 5.5 million virtual pirates created by users worldwide and do some digital marauding on Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" site, for example.

Tie-ins with movies or stuffed animals are just the start. At the Virtual Worlds Expo in Los Angeles, Irwin Toys showed off Me2, a new virtual gaming device that is essentially 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.

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