A penguin has been showing up at Cisco's public events lately. Attentive and civil, it never causes a disturbance, but sits quietly on a seat and listens courteously to the presentation on routers, or optical networking, or IOS software, or whatever the topic of the day happens to be. Although the only one of its species in the room -- everyone else is human, although some are rather eccentrically dressed -- no one gives it a second look.

	(click image for larger view) The Devil Wears Prada is playing on the large-screen television, and boxes of video games that link to Circuit City's main Web site are neatly stacked on shelves, but no one is around to watch or buy. view the image gallery

Welcome to Cisco's headquarters on Second Life, the immersive technology platform that is the ultimate enabler of personal fantasy. Originally the stomping ground of gamers and technical hipsters, the four-year-old 3-D virtual world has lately taken on some of the blander characteristics of the Mall of America. Companies from Toyota to Dell, Sears, Adidas, IBM and Circuit City have all established bulkheads there. And depending on your point of view, you could consider this influx of brands the exciting precursor of how we'll be conducting business in coming decades -- or the ultimate exercise in corporate flat-footed dunderheadedness.

"What the useful application will be for business is the million dollar question," says Bob Moore, a member of the research staff at the Computing Science Laboratory at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), who studies virtual worlds. "A lot of it is just plain hype. We see corporations are excited about it -- just as we were excited when we first discovered it -- but the jury is still out about the real business value."

"There's been a lot of breathless virtual-dog-bites-virtual-man coverage in the media," says Edward Castronova, a professor at Indiana University, and head of the school's Synthetic Worlds Initiative. "However, once we get past that kind of hype, then things could start getting really interesting."

Grand Plans, Negligible Results
If you've read the press releases of the companies that have entered Second Life, you'll have already heard the rather grandiose predictions how some of the biggest design, marketing and sales challenges in the real world are about to be solved by the virtual one.

Having trouble understanding what your customers really want in a pair of jeans? Let them design them personally! Ditto a car. Or a new kitchen. Want to increase brand awareness? Open a storefront where shoppers can virtually browse your products, "engage" with them, and become more loyal! Hope to convert browsing into real dollars? Enable a link that sends them to your Web site where they can hand over their credit cards!

(click image for larger view) IBM has established several sites in Second Life -- several in partnership with other companies -- but despite their beauty, they are eerily devoid of virtual life. view the image gallery

It sounds good. The problem is that none of this is happening. The virtual stores are empty. The design simulations are kludgy -- and represent the ultimate exercise in pointless boredom for users who want to indulge their ultimate fantasies, not decide between olive green and stainless steel for a new refrigerator.

And about designing those clothes -- or shoes, or cars, or furniture -- that can then be translated into real world products and sold: this is an unlikely prospect in a world where people are not particularly interested in creating faithful representations of their real lives.

"It remains to be seen if boring convention will take over from escapism, and whether the two can coexist, much less result in real-world results," says Steve Prentice, distinguished analyst and chief of research for the Gartner Group.

"It's definitely not yet a mature commercial environment," says Joel Greenberg, senior planner with advertising agency GSD&M, which handles major accounts for AT&T, Chili's, Southwestern Airlines and Norwegian Cruise Lines. "Your ROI isn't going to be based upon sales, but on other factors." Indeed, although personally a strong believer in the business possibilities of Second Life, Greenberg has yet to interest any of GSD&M's major accounts in establishing Second Life sites. "They are both confused and resistant," Greenberg admits. "There's the fact that they simply don't know what it is. Then they don't like the relatively small audience -- they're used to being mass advertisers, not marketers to limited communities -- and there's a fundamental difference in that approach."