Scale and avatar sizes seem to be off in realation to RL

I searched the forums but couldn't find any disscusion of "scale","size","meters" but there has to have been some disscusion about this already!

In making avatars I noticed that the SL meter does not seem to be to scale with the default avatars. Also most custom avatars tend to be to scale to the SL default or even taller, which I guess means everyone is too big!

Just eyeballing the avatars against size prims I've come up with women being about 210cm tall and men being around 230cm. In RL the averages are 165cm and 175cm respectively. I think that means RL people are about 3/4 of what the AVs are (but I wouldn't swear to it since math is hard...^_^;

I also found that the shortest AV you can make is about 150cm... which would mean that the youngest person you can represent would be a tall 10 year old... but if you apply same scale factor you get a relative 110ish - which means that an accurate 10 year old should look like a 4 year old next to one of the default characters (ignoring proportions of course).

I know that folks prefer images of people that are more elongated than in actuallity... but is everyone aware of this phenomenon? Do we know why this descison was made when designing the game? Are houses and building and objects usually scaled to compensate for this? Do most folks just eyeball everything and take a pass on being OCD? ^_^;;

I've always said that the 'average' height here in SL is much taller than in RL. So yes, i've noticed it, but as to the 'why' behind it - ya got me.

I have to say that it's amusing when i stand next to my friends and only come up to thier elbows though. I have one of the 'small' avatars, measuring up at 5'2" or so.

I've seen mostly small avatars around me. Though I've been sizing my AV down for quite a while, she's still a sasquatch. I preferred to make her the size she is because I noticed when I made her smaller the less I could see her face or other details about her. I didn't consider that there was a phenomenon ... I just did it because I had bad eyes.

I have set the height value at around 65 to 68. I'm 5'8" in RL, so 68 inches seemed accurate. There is a free ruler in SL though that you touch and gives you the height of your AV in feet and inches. According to that, I'm in the 6 feet range but I wear high platform shoes so it adds up.

Oh a ruler? I want to find one of thoose - It'll definately help!

From what I could tell tho' when messing around, the number on the size slider isn't an absolute hieght. If you set it at 0, you still have to shrink you legs, neck and I think hip length to get the shortest possible avatar... Maybe it's just a coincidence that avlaue of 68 is 68"? I'll have to log in and check...

Ok I found a ruler and confirmed it. The default AVs are 73" and 79" The averages should be 64" and 70"...

The builder's tape measure also warns that average AVs are 2.1 meters - that's roughly 80"!

Guess I'll build my AVs to this adjusted scale... which means it's possible to make a 4 year old but giants will have to be a little less...er..giant!

I'd really like to know if the Linden provided inworld objects are also built to this off-scale and why it was chosen in the 1st place?

Aestival, your figures are close to mine. I came up with a 1:1.2 ration between SL and RL that I use as a guideline when doing anything that requires accurate (or at least consistent) measurements.

But, in general, I think the SL world looks even smaller than that. Two main reasons for that: avatars walk pretty fast, and they can fly. That makes traversing a 10m distance much quicker than in RL, therefore it tends to look smaller.

Also, because of the need to accommodate for detached cameras, ceilings tend to be much higher. Most RL houses have 8-9 foot ceilings, say 3 meters roughly. A 3 meter ceiling in SL would look like you would barely fit. Even if you account for the 1.2 factor, 3.6 meters is still looks way too low for a ceiling.

I wonder what would happen if you slowed down the avatar walk speed and removed flight. Would buildings get smaller and closer together?

As an SL "midget" (i.e. normal RL height) I've often wondered about this.

My pure unsubstantiated guesses are either:
a) the folks at LL are all preternaturally tall.
b) they had the world in mostly working form and found that a normal sized humanoid didn't have sufficient space for texturing or articulation or something.

In the spirit of starting silly rumors, I put my money on (a).

If everyone always moved around in mouse move, walked at a casual rate of, say, 3 mph (1.34 meters per second), and couldn't fly I'm positive things would get smaller.

However, large things add a mystical grandeur to the environment. In order for them to be enjoyable in real world time (RWT) you have to be able to move about rapidly.

The other problem is so much stuff can't be done while in mouse move view. It would be _nice_ if we had a first person perspective view that had all tools available. That would also help sizes.

Some of the stuff I've been playing with creating I've done in what would be huge sizes real world but turn out to be small in SL. However, if I go walking up to them in mouse view mode, they look huge again.

Think about this, though ... a 20x20 house platform... it would take nearly 1/2 a minute to cross one edge.

Another thing to consider is the time frame. The official stats show no time compression. But in reality, the "day" seems to be about 2 hours long (what's the official number?). This means things should happen at about 12x the speed... and that really does make things smaller.

If it was all RWS (real world size) and RWT then those cheap 4mx4m plots of land would actually be useful (if they supported more than 3 prims).

Afterall, that is 172 square feet... a typical cubicle is 64 square feet. (could you imagine a group of 4 SL people in a 2.5mx2.5m room? (even with mouse view) But 4 people can often get into a work cube of that size...).


With the _size_ of prims irrelevant, things also get larger. A max prim dimension of 5m would make things smaller, on average, too.

BTW... the ruler says the first floor is 3.8m high. That's over 12 feet. That's quite a high floor -- about 50% above normal for a residential place.


Oh, one other thing... the field of view in game basically has no peripheral vision. That means we zoom out to see more instead of panning frequently. This increases desired space requirements.

Just my L$.02.

Cubey... I think the conversion factor is hard to figure out because it doesn't seem to be linear. That is, the ratio of RL to SL for the two default avatars is not the same.

73" and 79" The averages should be 64" and 70"

64":73" = 1:1.14
70":79" = 1:1.13
67" (avg across genders):82.5"builder's tape avg) = 1:1.23

Milo uses 1:1.2, which rounder and not far from the average of 1.23 and 1.13 (1.1, but then again I'm not sure how much a rounder number helps since we're (ok dumb me) is gonna have to use a calculator anyways!

Personally I'm going to use the default AVs 1:1.135 ratio just because it's everybody's starting point. That's for vehicles and vatars and objects I guess... if I ever build buildings it'll be a whole different set of fudge factors!

I'm also not going to worry about fudging it when I make really large or really small things since a lot of the scale is fudged in SL anyways for building reasons and wacky avatars!

I'm going to stick with 1:1.2 because it's pretty much just a guess anyway, and it's easier to do mental math

Another factor for size difference perception I can add to the list is sloppy avatar control. We humans don't need as much space to walk around, turn, etc. because we mostly have very finer motor skill than our avatars. Your av can pretty much take LARGE steps forward or backward, or side to side, and move its head around. Because of this, stairs, hallways, doorways/entrances, paths, etc. need to be wider to accommodate, which further adds to the perception of size difference.

/me is in awe of Milo's mental math skills! ^_^;;

You're right about the spaces problem... but if everyone scales up to fit into the larger architecture won't the problem repeat itself? Not with the step size so much as with general over crowding / passing / bumping and with the desire for further out camera angles to see more of the folks around you...

By mental math, I mostly meant I can remember to punch 1.2 on the calculator.

Haha! Ok that makes more sense...

don't trust the avi ruler that looks like a measuring tape. my friend was playing around with it and then for fun made a prim and moved it onto herself and scaled it to touch the top of her head and the bottoms of her feet. the tape said she was 5'3" but the prim was 5'11". i tried the same thing and the tape said i was 5'11" while the prim was taller again.

i think the reason we're all taller than irl has two reasons. 1. it's psychological. if you can be tall and impressive why not do it? 2. there's no reference point when you make an av. i keep running into 7'9" new people who wonder why everyone around them is a midget.

People are tall because they can.
The avatar sliders give you the possibility for gross excesses without any hint as to what is considered normal IRL.
We should have three editing modes... Man, Woman, and Freeform.
The first two would be tuned to RL constraints, making it easier for people to make "pretty" avatars, while the latter would let you go wild and create monsters to your heart's content

Sniff, Eggy thinks Im a monster now because I am so large