Sizes in sl

I'll throw in my two cents about what constitutes "proportional". There are three main factors to consider when deciding what size to make your builds, avatar height, camera angle, and navigation. I'll take them one at a time.

Avatar height has been a problem since day one in SL. Whomever it was at LL who built the first avatar really dropped the ball on sizing. It's clear that the avatar department at the time wasn't in very good communication with the land department because the two are basically from different planets, size wise. It's very difficult, if not downright impossible, to give your avatar correct human body proportions if its height is "normal", as measured in meters.

For example, the avatar I wear most often is a replica of Seven of Nine from Star Trek. In RL, the actress in costume is 5'11", or 1.8 meters, in height (yes, she's tall for a woman to begin with, and they've got her in some pretty impressive heals). To get her body shape right in SL, I stood the av in front of a full body photo of the character, so I could adjust the sliders for a precise match of her actual proportions. At the 1.8 meter height, it just couldn't work. There was simply no way to duplicate the actress's hourglass figure properly without making her taller. The sliders don't have enough range. To make it work, I had to increase the height to about 2.28 meters.

So, I either have to live with her being 7 and half feet tall, or else have her look wrong. I'd rather have her look right. Obviously, it follows that every piece of furniture I build for her has to be similarly upsized to match.

The same body proportion limitations are present in all avatars, of course, which means most people in SL are freakishly tall. Again, it follows then that most furniture, rooms, doorways, props, etc, also need to be "too big". A generally safe ratio tends to fall somewhere between 1.25 to 1 and 1.5 to 1.

The next factor is camera angle. Unlike in the real world in which you're always seeing everything from eye level, in SL your point of view is usually quite high. Ceilings that are any lower than about 3.5 to 4 meters off the floor tend to interfere with most people's cameras pretty heavily. Of course, anyone can simply move his or her camera around to compensate, but most people are not very good at that, unfortunately.

Considering that real ceilings are usually around 2.3 meters above the floor, the 3.5 meter minimum in SL gives you a ratio of about 1.5 to 1. If you want to keep your buildings proportional to SL's "eye level", they should be about 50% bigger than "normal".

Finally, you also have to account for people's clumsy navigation skills. Most people really suck at walking and flying around, especially if they have to contend with a low frame rate, which most people do. It takes a really gentle touch to move around in SL with any degree of precision. Most people have a lot of trouble with that. So, to allow people to move around inside your buildings, you have to build in some extra elbow room. For this, again, 1.5 to 1 is generally a safe ratio.

To sum it up, I think it's a bit naive to say that almost everything in SL is out of proportion. It would be far more accurate to say that just one thing is disproportionate, the unit of measure itself. When you factor in all of the above, it becomes pretty easy to see that meters in SL are actually about one third smaller than meters in RL. Look at it that way, and everything else seems to match up pretty well.

So, when you're building in SL, give yourself 50% more little SL meters, and your creations' sizes will line up pretty well with the amount of larger RL meters that are in their analogous RL items.