I haven't been able to come up with anything, and I've been thinking about it on and off ever since SGI rolled out their WebSpace viewer in 1995. That's a big reason why cybermalls, as a marketing model, have completely failed to take off and that's also a major reason why VRML hasn't worked very well as a user interface. In order to go shopping in the real world, for instance, we're forced to travel from one physical locale to another. A given mall may not include every one of the exact stores we'd prefer, but, if it offers enough of them, we'll gladly accept substitutes for our other selections in exchange for the convenience. On the Internet, by contrast, we have no need of such a concentration of otherwise-unrelated entities at a single address.
Virtual malls are, thus, a solution in search of a problem.
That metaphor, which works so beautifully in Neuromancer and Snow Crash , just doesn't apply to the Web or the rest of the Internet. That's the main reason why VRML still isn't ready for prime time. And why it may never be.