How tall is "not a child av"

What about Tinies?

Your use of the word "justification" in this sentence completely invalidates anything else you have to say. It means you're merely looking for an excuse to act.

It's not at all obvious to me. The only measurement that matters in SL is the SL measurement... unless you're going to measure by the microns of memory chips and disk surfaces. People build much larger than scale because the camera controls are so clumsy, but if you tried to fit avatar height to typical building height even 7' tall avatars are way too small. In RL I can stand on my toes and touch the ceiling in most rooms. My 7' tall avatar typically has problems even reaching the top of a door.

That doesn't mean the 7' avatar is really 4' tall, it means the building is larger than scale. Well, most buildings, some rather important ones aren't:
LL has a RL conference room recreated to scale in SL, with a projection TV at one end so the RL and SL rooms are contiguous.
What about Tinies?

If you really want to have fun, take my store for example. It's a cookie jar. To scale, an avatar would be about 6" tall in the presence of my cookie jar. Or better, Greenies. We are at the scale of roaches there... (^_^)

Proportion in SL is what you make of it. Scale in SL is what you make of it. If you're building big for your big avatar, that's your thing. But don't consider your norm the set standard. I will not comply to it because I'm not you. It is not impossible to make to-scale avatars and builds. We have a measurement tool that is the prim-meter. It is not unreasonable to allow for diversity in sizes and heights. If you want to be 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall then be 8 feet tall and accept that you are 8 feet tall. (=_=)

As for child avatars. Really, a kid-AV is a kid-AV the moment they assert an age. That's it. Some people are full time. Some people are part time. Failure to recognize this is a horribly limiting factor when we're in world with the intent to escape limits. If I was a 4' tall loli-imp yesterday, that was yesterday. Today I may be a 4' tall elementary school runaway, a 5'8" tall dominatrix, a 9' long mermaid, or any other one of the myriads of avatars I may have in my collection. It is not up to YOU to determine what I am at the moment. Take me at face value at the moment. (^_^)

In RL I've seen a 4' tall 50-year-old and a 6'2" 13-year-old. In SL, it seems like the elder of the two would be more likely to be kicked out of a strip club. People, humans, heck CREATURES come in all sizes and shapes. Why can't that exist here too? (T_T)

There's an underlying assumption in all this that I haven't seen mentioned very often and that is that SL is based on the meter. I remember clearly that "Oooohh...." moment sometime in my first hour when I got to the part in the orientation path about learning to build and the sign showed me the objects tab. Knowing that a meter is 39 inches, it was a short step to putting a 1.8 meter box beside myself and shrinking a bit to what, in fact, turned out to be my RL height of 5' 11.

I think that I'm far from the only one that did something like that that prior and within a few months of my start date and that there's a fundamental (generalized) answer to why people aren't doing that anymore. It has to do with media blitzes and the nature of the people that were attracted to these blitzes. Starting late 2006 and continuing through the summer of 2007, SL attracted attention in the media in several countries, drawing large clusters of people in discrete groups. The island Elizabeth and I were on was very newbie friendly. We had two stargates and with a name like The Commune, it was a popular destination for wanderers. That gave me a kind of window on the people that were coming into SL. The thing I started seeing and commenting on was that the new people, especially the ones that were answering media articles tended to be non-technical.

This could devolve into psychobabble for which I'm completely unsuited. There was a thing that happened sometime around June, 2007 that sums the whole thing up for me. I was helping a friend at an infohub with her MCP (Male Chauvinist Pig to those of us of an age. hehe) RL boyfriend. I managed to get his attention and teach him some of the basics he wouldn't listen to her about. After a time I was looking around and noticed a group of male avis kind of off by themselves. They were male bonding. "How bout them Aardvarks" and "Ah took mah F350 for a spin in the woods lookin' for deer", and so forth. While I was chuckling at that (having been there and done that), suddenly one of them went into appearance and came back out as a longleggedy giant. That was interesting, but then two more, followed by more. Before long there must have been 15 avis towering over the rest of us, all male. The mental picture I had, and that had me laughing so hard I scared the cats was that of young fellows lined up at a public urinal pretending not to look. You guys know what I'm talking about. Ok, so size matters and the fun thing about SL is now we can do something about it. hehe.

So... my observation in all this is that, whatever the overall result, and knowing that in a current shape store, the typical male shape you can buy now is 7 feet, the initial impetus for the current crop of giant avis is male insecurity.

Boy, am i gonna get it......

*boggles at the turn a simple question about rough guesses on height has taken*

The whole height thing is complicated by the fact that most rulers in SL don't measure your height, they measure the height of the "bounding box" for an av.

So when an SL ruler says you're 6'6", you're actually 7'1" (rezz a prim that height, make it phantom and walk into it to prove this).

I was banned from a club - they said I was "obviously" a kid av because I was less than 7ft tall. I told them my RL father was also less than 7ft tall, so did that make him a child?

Given that everything in SL is larger than life, I don't know why LL decided to use metres as a unit of measurement. If they'd chosen "Linden cubits" or something, the fact I'm 1.80 of these arbitrary units would probably make more sense than trying to relate it to real life. Very few kids are 1.80m in RL.

Everything in SL *isn't* larger than life. Nothing in SL is more than a few microns long.

And even if they'd called the measure "linden cubits" the we'd still have the same problem of 90% of the avatars being in the top 5% of the height range. Because everyone wants to be above average. And the 5% who just wanted to be medium height would end up having the same problems.

I have to wonder how much of this height discrimination is really about height and how much is the rest of an avatar's appearance & behavior.

I have yet to see the business that has a "You must be this tall to play" and a height detector at the entrance.

I have seen several, actually, which is one of the reasons I started this thread. Even my re-edited body at 1.7m tall by prim measurement doesn't meet all of their stated rules - doesn't help that they are doing it by script and thus it's eye height or bounding box or whatever it is those things measure, which is likely to be an even-bigger-than-usual underestimation for a furry with a big ol' attachment for a head

Forgive me for posting a lot of pictures but I would like to illustrate a point.


This is the entrance to rather popular store. I'm wearing Imnot's measurment prim. It's 10 feet tall. Have you ever seen a store in real life with a doorway this big? The entire store is designed with the same proportion.


Here is a chair at the Shelter's pool. The seat is 2.5 feet high. Get a ruler and measure 2.5 feet high next to your chair that you are sitting on right now. That's a big chair in the Shelter.


Here is a couch at NCI. It's actually not bad for height which is about 2 feet but it's over 10 feet long! I want a couch like this in RL.


Here we are in help island. Another chair. Look at the dimensions. It's B.I.G.

I wandered around several other popular places including all the Linden welcome areas and found the exact same thing everywhere. Our buildings and furniture are all giant sized. So what do you think? People are just making themselves tall because they're all idiots? Or are they all just naturally adjusting their height to their environment? Who is short when compared to our furniture in SL?

http://www.chairsource.ca/site/design_howto.htm

which came first: the avatar or the prim?

That's a good question. Unfortunately the answer is "primitar" who is an avatar made out of prims... LOL. Quite tall too.

two possibilities to be presented, complete with bitten tongue, it being so firmly planted in cheek:

a) SL began in America, quite well known for the prevailing belief that bigger is always better.

b) when the SL world first emerged from it's big bang tango, eventually forming SLAdam and SLEve out of the prim-ordial ooze, they were presented with the building blocks on which to base their civilization. these basic, ancient elements were measured in what would become known as "metrics" (short for meta tricks), a measurement based logically on a system of tens. now this should have been easily understood by SLAdam and SLEve, yet, somehow, it was a concept beyond their grasp and they chose to cling to a system that would only make sense had they been born with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot (scientists are searching for evidence that, at one time, ancient primitars had 12 digits per appendage, as they refer to this measurement as a "foot". as yet, this evidence has been slow in coming). these ancient beings were unable to, or find the patience to, adjust to this very strange and new "metric" system of measurement, choosing to translate it into their own natural form of a foot. thusly their structures grew. a doorway which would be 7 feet tall, without the mathematical process of conversion (perhaps unavailable to those poor souls) became 7 meters, and 8 or 9 foot tall ceiling became 8 or 9 meters, and, as evolution would have it, SLAdam and SLEve grew to matching proportions.

but now i'm thinking that those two possibilities are both formed from the same basis. the insidious spread of "the American Way".

it's funny the problems 2nd and 3rd person perspective cause, isn't it.

And it is primitar that our mesh was based on, which was therefore also designed out of scale.

It doesn't matter which came first. People build buildings out of scale to make up for the clumsy controls. People make their avatars larger to fit in those buildings, and because everyone else's avatars are big, and they don't want to be short. Now the camera controls are even clumsier, because they back off further to see over the shoulder of the avatar. So people build even bigger. So people make their avatars bigger. Whatever the limit is, that's what people who don't stop and think "how big is my avatar, really" are going to end up at. If Linden Labs let you make your avatar four meters tall, that's how big the tallest groups of people would be by now.

But people aren't ALL seven feet tall. Not all communities in SL have fallen into this feedback loop. I've done tests, had an avatar parked in popular gathering spots now and then over the past two and a half years. The average height of avatars in SL, averaged over this time, is still a smidgen over six feet. The average height of furry avatars is six to ten inches shorter... slightly shorter than the US average male height, if I recall correctly.

The SL mesh was based on the default Poser mesh six years ago.

I try to make great public buildings (non commercial) that enforce real life proportions.

Some peoples actually shrank down their av to visit it

If some shrank their a, maybe they will keep it that way


You can also join the "league for normally sized avatars" wich is one of my groups

Most of the current female starter avs are all around 5'9" to 5'11" tall (by prim, not bounding box), as is Ruth. So still tall by RL standards, but fairly short here. My av is a tiny bit over 6' (or 5'6" if you use a height measurer). It's rare that I meet anyone anyone shorter, and if I do they're often neko or pixies.

Nearly 5'10" in RL, and very rare I meet a taller woman.

If only everyone used mouselook all the time.



The 7' tall (barefoot by the bounding box measurement) avatar is mostly hyperbole. I've only encountered three human female avatars that were that tall, and they almost always towered over everyone else, male or female, in a room.

Point taken. I should have clarified that issues of scale came out of the primitar. Spot on about the Poser mesh. Teach me to post when I should be sleepin'.