How long is a meter in SL?

Hi i am 1.85 meter and i feel like a midget here in SL

I first tryed to keep things in RL scale but Im starting to see its just a uphill batlle
My nicely designed furnature cant be scaled, the(nicely made) flowers in the garden are over 2.5 meter high and opfcourse cant be scaled like my kitchen etc. etc.

Ofcourse this stupid invaltion is robing us. Neigbours look so close as they sit in fornt of there 20 meter high beach hut. Even the linden waves and land textures seem well out of scale.

What I like to know is: Is there some fixed number to multiply by so that I can at leased stay in scale with most of the better designed, out of scale objects?
Is there some unwritten code for builders to follow?? Im sure the professional builders have thought about this to.

sorry for the spelling

P.S. for the Lindens, a hight indicator in appearence would be nice

A meter is a meter, but the commonly available systems for measuring your height only measure to your eye level. This is because that height is used for the mouselook camera height.

To get your REAL height, make a phantom prim, streach it to match the top of your head, and look at the Z-axis height of that prim. You'll find that "1.85 Meters" as reported by an avatar ruler translates to over 2 meters in actual height. So to begin with, anything made "exactly to scale" looks too small, if you use an avatar ruler to gague your height.

So... everyone scales their cars, houses and the like bigger, so they "look right" against the people...

But there is another factor as well, and that is camera angle. Unless you are in mouselook, the camera is floating above and behind you. This means that accurately placed ceilings are too low, because your "invisible cameraman" who is following you around is an 8 foot tall or taller giant... This means ceilings have to be positioned higher, and rooms made bigger, or that "behind and above" camera angle makes things seem impossibly cramped.

Between the visual distortion of the camera angle and the inaccurate avatar ruler measurement, most people make their avatars too big. And for things to work well, everything else ends up being made "too big" to match the people.

The solution is to design things at a scale of between "1.25 to 1" and "1.5 to 1". So you get 4 to 5 meter tall ceilings, and the like.

I'd find a chair or couch or something and just adjust your height until it looks right for the size you're wanting to be.

Any unit of measurement is arbitrary, it's only when everyone agrees on the same unit that it has significance.

The only basis for comparison we have between the Real World and SL is the human figure, which has very well defined proportions. But given the amount of variation in human sizes, it's impossible to determine that an SL meter is equal to a RL meter. You can be free to make that determination yourself.

But be prepared that in SL, without a governing body to determine an accepted and universal conversion factor between RL Meters and SL Meters, many people will have varying ideas what the relationship between the two are.

Yes, but since there are several unit of measure, it is necessary to have conversion rules. For example, when I go to USA, I know how long a mile is with respect to a kilometer. This is important to me when I drive, because it gives me an idea of how long it will take to go from a town to another. If the SL meter is different from RL meter, no problem, but I need to know the ratio. Most people do not care since they use only in-world building, but soon or later SL will have to face the possibility to import CAD or other 3D drawings. If a competitor would releases a platform as good as the SL one with serious import capabilities, SL would be in a mess. SL is still a big place of entertainement. If we want to do real business or serious games in SL, LL needs to give us more "professional" functionalities. It is not a case that the last statistics show a drop in the number of premium members and company-owned lands.

In RL, we are always in Mouselook mode. Our eyes are in our head.

In SL we are often (usually) in camera mode. Our eyes are following along about ten feet behind and ten feet above us.

Because of this, buildings in SL tend to be much larger than real life, to allow for the cameras to be in the same room with us.

If only avatars were all only half as large, think of all the prims we could not use

In theory, an SL meter is an RL meter. It's about this big (/me holds his hands out.)

Only ... there are issues.

First, everyone wants to be tall, so the average height is way above average height in RL.

Second, when LL created the avatar bodies, they goofed: the avatars were made too large for the SL meter. For example, if you want to make a 5'2" petite female avatar and make it so it ends up measuring 5'2" in SL, you can't make it thin enough without making it look shrunken and anemic. Try again around 6', and things look much better.

Put these two facts together, and you end up with an SL "meter" that just doesn't match RL factors.

Finally, the issue mentioned above concerning the "camera". For small-to-medium sized rooms, ceilings have to be higher and rooms need to be bigger in SL than they would be in RL, to make room for the fact that the camera floats above and behind the avatar. So, even after compensating for the first two factors above (where I think a 25% increase handles it pretty well), you need to make buildings bigger still simply to have room for people to be able to see and walk without problems. This is more an issue for smaller (home-sized) rooms and buildings; public/commercial buildings don't need to be adjusted as much because they tend to be large to begin with, so the extra room for camming isn't required.

thanks for all the answers. Around 1.25 up to 1.5 as i understand it

I understand we want to have the camera over our head but some how all having to big avatars seems to make this relatively wurse.

It would make so much more sence to me to keep the avatar in scale and lower the cam. (1/4- to 1/3) That way we would all have know excactly how big to make the replicas of RL that seem to be so favoured by most. It would indeed save some prims and give us all relatively more land. (we now seem to throw away 1/4 to 1/3 of the space we pay for)

But the wurse thing about it I found is this 1.25-1.5 upscale is costing the SL envirement dearly and It realy looks as if it could use all help !!!!

txs for the posts have fun. Io

P.S. a save the envirement save some prims get in scale action would be nice

/agreed

For reference, I recently completed a large building that I made precisely from the RL architectural plans, which I scaled up by a factor of 1.5 to 1. The result was pretty darned close to perfect in terms of being able to move about freely and have things look right. I might have managed with as little as 1.4 to 1, but probably would not have wanted to go smaller than that.

Interesting -- I wouldn't have expected a large building to need that much upscaling, but I accede to your vast experience. (No sarcasm here, in case anyone's wondering.)

It's the camera. If you go to 1:1 scaled things, they will say things like "best viewed in mouse view".

My rule of thumb is 1.3:1, with "more generous ceilings".. really I try to have 4.5-5m ceilings, just to be cam friendly.