Why SL feels funny

So i finaly figured out why SL feels akward, im sure other people have done this them selvs, but what i did was calculate my RL height to meters and then make a pillar in SL next to me. To my surprise i was over a head, neck and partial shoulders over the block, when i tried to seze myself down to an apropreate height i quicly found that i had to zero the scale and still was taller then the pillar.

Mabey im the only one but is it just em or is everything in SL out of proportion?

Not really a complaint but a strange observation.

Yep. Second Life is the land of giants. It may be too hard to fix now. It would have been nice if, from the beginning, you had to input your avatar height in real-world measurements instead of a simple slider. I think alot of people don't realize how tall they really are.

HP

I noticed, most doorknobs are at eye level

Mebbe Second Life just has less gravity. Would explain the giant proportions and ability to fly.

I'm convinced by now that SL has proportions all unto its own. Relative to offline, the average avatar is taller and houses have to be roomier if you're not in mouselook (and cam angle adjustment difficulties). It is what it is.

The biggest factor for me has alway been my "eye" size. I'm rarely in mouselook so regardless of my av I'm basically a 5-meter hemisphere.

You can trace most of the "everybody is giants" to the camera views. If you build at "normal" proportions than every time you are inside an average sized space you end up with your camera view on the outside of the building. The inside is just not big enough to hold you and your camera view.

Everything else stems from this. Builder's make their buildings bigger - so furniture builder's build their items larger to fit the space - all this makes a RL-sized avatar feel small so the player increases the size of the avatar. All this so everything feels right.

I really wish people would give up the notion that RL=SL when it comes to sizes. This discussion comes up over and over as new people come in game and deside to see how big their avatar is if it was in RL. But it's not - it is in SL and this is just how things work here.

So blame it on the camera views and move along.

Going by classic heroic 8 head proportions(http://www.saveloomis.org/FigureDrawing/26.htm) , the SL avatar is a total mess. You can of course get an AV to conform to these proportions but what you end up with is a long armed mongoloid thing that some how...doesn't look proportionate. I think this has alot to do with our shoulders ( the most complicated/bendy/meshy parts of our avatars) and things that LL has made automatically inherent in the avatar mesh that we can't really change. Going with heroic proportions can get you *close* to realistic though, and will work as long as you know when to break it's rules.

I've also noticed that people are lead to becoming giants because they see one part as too small and so they make it larger, then another part seems small compared to the first where it was fine before, so the second part becomes larger...eventually resulting in giants. For example, if your arms seem too short, instead of trying to make them longer try to make the length of your hips/legs/torso shorter. This will have the same effect without the escalation that comes with making everything larger.

A few nights ago Mak and I got out the av ruler (thanks Taco!) and made our avs closer to our RL height. He stopped at 6' and I worked mine all the way down to 5'1" which is my RL height.


Here's a photo of me after that standing next to Mak's friend Feri who is obviously at the other extreme end of the height slider:

World of Warcraft also suffers from oversized scenery.

I agree with Saul that it's all stemming from the camera.

and I can't wait to tell Mak he's shorter than me

Our size combined with the panoramic third person camera angle requires that we build indoor spaces far larger than we would need if we were naturally smaller and had an actual first person view rather than mouseview (whose bright idea was that anyway?).

Consequently, valleys and mountains and beaches that provide wonderful depth of view presold turn into little humps on the ground when gigantic builds have to cover their every square millimeter in order for the indoor space to be usable.

It's very very difficult to build something small and pretty, that scales well with the landscape. Such builds don't scale at all with the avs the want to use them. It's too bad that sim size was hard coded into the server base.

Ah, so is that why the proposition for bigger "low-density" sims cant be done?

Bigger people need more land to live in.

IF you start making people the correct height, you will destroy the land market!!

*snickers*

The Eromonics of body to space at times is way off. Objects to avie is not at times scales right. I see alot of this in the game.

For the longest time my avatar was really tall until I decided to try and get near my RL height, which is 5'8 1/2. I'm much shorter now than a lot of female avatars I see. Something I've observed in many female avatars lately is this squished hips syndrome which results in the "shelf bum" as I call it. This can effect the avatar height quite a bit I believe and in turn they try to make up for it with longer legs or torso.

Pfft. I think it's due to the "max butt" slider problem. You would think some people would just start sliding it down as to create a gentle curve versus having a ledge where you can sit your purse.

Guess there is no accounting for aesthetics.

Makes things even worse depending on the avatar and attachments. I had to scale mine down twice to get him level with my RL 6' 7", and my avatar still seems abnormally tall compared to certain objects.

I think there are number of reasons the scale is so off (many already covered above):

On average, avatar sliders go too high (admitted by Lindens I believe), and our quest to look like statuesque supermodels makes many max them out, or at least err on the high side.

Third-Person camera perspective means ceilings have to be taller and hallways wider. And hence, everything else needs to scale up in proportion. Doorways need to be taller so the room doesn't look cavernous, then the interior space needs to grow in proportion.

Fast walking and flying means you can cover a lot of ground quickly, and things don't seem so far away. Covering 10m is nothing in SL. And making things close can be problematic because the av's steps are so long it's hard to maneuver in tight spaces.

Along with that, lag and general lack of fine motor control means we need more space to maneuver fluidly.

Lack of Perspective/sense of distance means we can't really tell how far away things are as easily as in RL with parallax, focus and all the other tricks human eyes can do to give us clues. Also if texture repeats are too few it can trick us into thinking that cement/stucco wall is closer.

Camera zoom and the ability to interract from a distance means we don't even have to walk across the huge store floor to buy something or see it up close.

And lastly, we're just used to it. Big is the normal SL scale and anything realistic is short/cramped by comparison.

It's all Primitar's fault.

The key reason the Second Life world doesn't scale right is the properties of the camera "lens". I'm not all that knowledgable about optics at all, but I quickly noticed that something was up when I tried to recreate a RL space in SL. What looked roomy in RL was tight and cramped in SL, even in mouselook! At first I though the measuring units were off, but then I realized that it an go either way: the "meter" isn't a real meter, or the "eye" isn't a human eye.

If you go to Wikipedia: Angle of View , there are several pictures there. The one labeled "50mm lens" is the closest to what the human eye sees if it were in the same position (minus peripheral vision, etc). The one labeled "28mm lens" is what we have in Second Life. (Unless you control-alt-zoom in REALLY close, then it's more like the "210mm lens" picture.)

So it's not so much that the measurements are off, it's that our view port into the world is through a wide angle lens. This gives us a little more peripheral vision, which we would otherwise be lacking, but most people build as if the lens is a normal one so we LOSE the benefit of the wider angle.

Basically, the decision was made at Linden Lab to give us a wider view of the surroundings, but the residents, unaware of this "gift", went ahead and built the world as if the view was a normal one.

Is there some residual benefit of this arrangement? Maybe. It does, for sure, shrink the feel of the world around you. It makes owning more land more attractive. We may buy "2 acres", but it only feels like 1 to us when compared to reality.

When I first came to SL I spent well over an hour on orientation island creating my av. I was having so much fun, I probably could have been content just playing with sliders for days. I made myself very tall because I am 5' 10" irl and my hair long and red, made myself some fancy black flare pants with a cute red shirt. I was sooo proud of myself and how I looked. When I went into the Welcome area I was overwhelmed. I came from this lil dinky online game called The Realm which is very cartoonish, and here I was in SL and seeing all the wonderfual avs. Upon looking around, I noticed I was pretty tall compared to everyone else. I felt like Zsu the Amazon Newbie. Since then I have shortened myself, but I am still a bit tall as I don't want to be real short.

The only real problem I experience with having a taller av is shoes. Unfortunately most shoes in SL are made for size 0, which to me is completely ridiculous even for shortie avs, as you get those unsightly ankle bulges from hell. I like my tall av, I'm not over tall and I am well proportioned so as not to look freakish.

How tall are you? My shortest non-tinied AV is close to 4'. Most of my AVs are about my height or less, and I'm not a giant.

Of course my 20' tall giant robot skews the scale a bit, but I got that one specifically to see what having a REALLY divergent av felt like.

When you adjusted your height, did you adjust the rest of your sliders down as well?

This is all very interesting and quite true. Now that I step back and look it, I can see that the major difference between a knock-my-socks-off build and a bunch-of-prims-stuck-together build is one that considers the fact that our panoramic view should include more items and detail than we're used to seeing in real life.

Windows are smaller, for instance, allowing you to see two or more at a time and making you look "through" them to gain a sense of depth. Standard building practice though is to build one giant window in the space providing a single wide-angle view that appears flat and lifeless.

Thank You Tiger for posting this info.