Rulers in SL are 18cm out!

I'm 5'10". My Be-bar ruler tells me so, and so does every other ruler in SL.

However, yesterday a friend gave me a "measure your height" objected, and it said I was 6'5". I told him it was totally out. But then I rezzed a block that was my "correct" height (1.797m), made it phantom and walked into it. And my head stuck out of it. My height really is 6'5", not 5'10".

So why does every ruler in SL tell me I'm 5'10"? And presumably this means that these ridiculous 7' giants that walk around in SL are actually 8'?

Anyone else noticed this?

I notice lots of people in SL are huge in height

It's because rulers only measure to eye level, and don't count prims and animations that affect height. The only way to get an accurate measure is to do what you did, and rez a prim to measure against.

In SL, the average human is around 7 feet tall. There are a lot of reasons for it though, and rulers have little to do with it. Good proportions are harder to get on smaller avatars, the camera is harder to control in small areas (like those built for small avatars), the avatar's bounding box goofs up small vehicles, etc etc.

It just seems insane - surely it's easy enough for LL to use any scale they want. I see plenty of avs walking around who I thought were 7'6" cos that's what my Be-bar told me - but they're actually going to be over 8ft.

Why didn't LL choose a scaling that made people a sensible height?

I made myself a camera tool that move the default camera position lower around mid torso, closer and on a much flatter angle, it really changes your perception of dimensions.

MY av is currently around 1m76 wich is pretty normal for RL, and i fit really nicely in 1:1 scaled builds.

I made my first guitar to the exact same size as a real life guitar... wore it on my small (for SL that is) avatar and it looks puny... so i made the guitar bigger so it looks to scale... so in conclusion .....

SL is out by a few percentages of a something or other... in my opinion (which is right) lol

It's all relative. So what difference does it make? All methods of measurement were initially related to something that one could actually use to compare. All those "units" were arbitrary until they became standards. SL's meter is one of those arbitrary units that has beome standard for things in SL (and only in SL. Not in anyway meant to relate to RL).....it makes no difference if it's 2 inches or 50 centimeters off. It only relates to things in SL and as long as it's consistant it's accurate for measurements. You can't compare real life to second life.....different standards entirely. Just learn the standards and adjust accordingly.

They did. But then residents came along and made rulers that don't match SL scale. There are all kinds of issues with measuring things because they don't always relate to each other. For the most part though, those rulers are way off.

Also, what Peggy said is right. SL scale doesn't match RL, and it hasn't in years (if it ever did). Deal with it. At this point, it's not possible to just change it so everyone matches, unless all the merchants AND consumers in SL magically aligned their products with each other to match a single unit of measure, all at the same time.

Also, to add to what I said earlier: In addition to the issues of small avatars, there are also those who scale themselves according to their rulers intentionally, and make themselves taller. Then there are those who want to be taller than that first group. Mostly, it seems to be about proportion and technical limits, like I said in my earlier post, but these other groups exist as well.

There are two separate arguments really. The first one, which isn't directly to do with rulers, is that you pointed out that there are good reasons for the average human being 7ft tall in SL. That is surely a LL issue of scaling - it seems logical to make sure that camera panning, proportions and so on look right, and then to benchmark all that against an average human RL height. If a virtual world means that you need to be 7ft tall for things to look "proper", then the scaling is unrealistic.

I realise it's too late to change it now, but it just seems a very strange position to have adopted in the first place.

That's a side issue, though. The main one is to do with rulers. There are some very clever scripters in SL, so why do people universally make rulers that are wrong? I'm not a scripter, so perhaps it is extremely difficult to build a ruler in SL - but it *sounds* as though it should be one of the easier tasks.

The reason it's significant, to answer Peggy's point though, is to do with building. If I build something for my use, I tend to make it to my dimensions. For instance, I might make my door 6'2" tall so I can walk through it comfortably, as I'm only 5'10". But of course, I'm *not* 5'10", so when I carefully build my object, I find the proportion is wrong because the rulers are wrong - a 6'2" door is way too small for me to walk through without banging my head.

A real life analogy would be buying a pair of jeans with a 28" waist, because my tape measure at home, and the tape measure in the shop says I have a 28" waist. Then when I get them home, they're way too tight because it turns out I actually have a 36" waist, so the jeans are too tight.

Since it's possible to build things in SL to the nearest millimetre, it just strikes me as bizarre that rulers are 18cm out. If they were just a few millimetres out, I could understand it, but 18cm out seems extremely odd.

just factor in your 18 cm. What's that? 8 inches? Whatever it is just factor it in. I believe most builders who build to scale in SL use 125 to 150 percent to compensate for the difference.

This HUD gives both Agent (what rulers generally use) and prim height:

http://shop.onrez.com/item/673060

LL measurements were originated by men, they are always calling 6" a foot

Oh at least. And Kyrah is right: it's all about the cam. Instead of looking out at eye level, the cam hovers above and behind us--which makes it easy to see where we're going because the avatar is in view. But the downside is that the cam at that height would skate along or above the ceiling of most to-scale builds.

So, not only are avatars oversized, but builds have to be oversized for the avatars in them, to make room for the cam. Next time you're in a comfortable-height build, walk up to a door, and you'll notice that the doorknob is at about chest (or even chin) level, and the top of the door is absurdly high. This looks really stupid when an avatar approaches, but it's what works best for comfortable navigation.

Then what about furniture? Should it match the avatar scale (and look tiny in the room), or match the room scale (and make the avatar look tiny when using it)? Usually more the former than the latter.

This all works out better in structures that should naturally have high ceilings, huge doors, and lots of room for relatively tiny furniture. Castles, cathedrals, dirigible hangars...

NOT WHILE I'M EATING!!!! Gawd! What a mess! (>_<

=^-^=

Haha...........I think that might be the other way around. That 6" is actually 9"..........maybe it was women who created SL.

LOL.

That sheds a different light on the expression "putting your foot in it"

That I agree with. Sorry, I'm not at my sharpest today so my arguments aren't all coming together properly

As for the rulers, I am a scripter and can say that it is, in fact, rather difficult to get a proper measure, at least from what I know. I've never actually tried it, but I do know that a script will generally measure the agent, which isn't the same size as your visible avatar. I don't know where to begin with measuring the visible avatar, much less things like prim heads and such. A ruler could be built to add a certain amount to an agent measurement, but that wouldn't be accurate either because not all avatars will have the same size head, hair, prims, etc.

Personally, if I need to quote size for something, I measure it with a plywood cube. When I said that my dragon stands 3.2 meters tall at the top of its head, I meant that if you put a 3.2 meter cube next to it, they'd be the same size. But then, I only build avatars, not buildings or anything else that would really need to match someone else's size.

There is only one LSL command that returns something resembling the avatar's height. It was intended for positioning the camera height for mouselook, so it gives you the height of the eyes. There is no scripted way to determine the assitional distance from the eyes to the top of the avatar skull, or whether or not to also add in the additional height from prim thinks, like prim hair, or a furry avatar head.

So, scripted "avatar rulers" have always lied to us, telling us that we are 5'7" tall, when in fact we're closer to 6'4" tall to the top of our head...

Yes, Builders now compensate for this by building at closer to a 1.25 or 1.5 to 1 scale. When I make something like furniture, I put on a male or female "Ruth" avatar - system defaults - and make the furniture so it fits the proportions of that body size. Thia allows it to fit the majority of avatars.

The other factor is that in real life, we only see through our own eyes, but in SL we often see from the follow-cam, a point that defaults to 2 feet above and 2 feet behind our head. Seen from that vantage point, a "normal" height person looks too small. Try putting on a pair of stilts in RL, and look at your friends and your surroundings. You'll find it very disorienting at first.

The shift in perspective also leads people to make things bigger than they should be, and to make ceiling heights in particular much higher than normal construction. A "to scale" room with 8 foot ceilings will place your follow cam inside the ceiling...

So, if you wanted to make a scripted device that would give an accurate result, one that reflects prim attachments and any other things that affect "actual" height, how would you do that?

Something that you step on, which rezzes a object that rises up and records when it stops colliding with the avatar? Something like that?

Might be nice to have something like that to give out in place of the omnipresent avatar height measuring objects that give the height to the eyes.

smaller (realistically sized) avs are NOT harder to keep in proportion.
i think the reason so many avs are huge is because there is no reference to meters in the appearance editor. add to that the fact that people like building huge furniture and whatnot and bobs your uncle.
ive also noticed a downsizing trend as avs mature. it seems that the longer an av (human avs anyway) has been on the grid the more likely it is to be smaller and in line with the in-world measuring system (prim height).

i will shamelessly promote n&b right here and note that the furni accommodates smaller avs nicely and even allows one to adjust their seating position relative to the furniture (no legs clipping through the sofa, etc).

as far as this script discussion, i dont know how it is done but katts hud does spit out accurate heights for anyone in the vicinity.

Yeah, at some point I got a prim and set it to my real world height and adjusted my avatar to match. When I put on an old shape that's normal for SL giant size it seems a bit odd now.

My theory is that some people make their avatars big so they look bigger on screen, without giving any thought to being in scale with their environment. Others, of course, want a big avatar because they want to be big in-world.

I'm 5'6" by RL measurements, but 5'11" by SL ones. Simple to explain - it's not my size that's changed, its the scale of the measurements - the SL foot and metre are a bit smaller than the RL ones, in the same way that a US gallon is a smaller volume than a British gallon.

Never date a real estate agent; they think everything, however small, is a lot.

Pep (Cue jokes about why women are lousy drivers . . .)

Actually, there are at least two different LSL functions. llGetAgentSize() is documented to do as described: get the height to about eyeball level. llGetBoundingBox() called on an agent returns something a little bigger, but doesn't seem to make up the 17 or 18cm difference. You can try it yourself with:

default
{
    touch_start(integer total_number)
    {
        key toucher = llDetectedKey(0);
        vector size = llGetAgentSize(toucher);
        list bb = llGetBoundingBox(toucher);
        vector bbMin = llList2Vector(bb, 0);
        vector bbMax = llList2Vector(bb, 1);
        llInstantMessage(toucher, 
            "Height by llGetAgentSize() = " + (string)size.z + ",
            height by llGetBoundingBox() = " + (string)(bbMax.z - bbMin.z));
    }
}

For my avatar, the difference between these is just 5cm, and the larger height returned is indeed about 12cm shorter than my avatar as measured by a prim--so that's all fairly useless anyway.