Is it just me??? (Proportion)

Does't if seem that there is an overall lack of a sense of proportion in Second Life? I'm going to pick on building for a moment because that is freshest in my mind......

My wife and I were have spent the last couple of weeks looking and houses and furnishings with an eye towards getting some land and ... well, you know the drill.

I'm going to pick on one house but the comments could apply to almost everything we looked at ....

To start, a 3-bedroom house that requires 4,000 square meters to set it up? Doorknobs and wall switches that were over my wifes head (admitedly her avatar is short - only 5'-10". Stair risers that hit me somewhere between the knees and the waist. It was/is easier to fly about the house rather than walk, fabric textures with 4 to 6" thick threads (So that I know it's fabric I guess) ... I could continue on, but I'm sure that you've all run into this and recognize the problem.

My thought is that people seem to be thinking that a foot and a meter are the about the same thing. I realize that we have some interesting architectural constraints ... but wouldn't a 12 foot (or approximately 4 meter) ceiling allow the camera that follows us to not be embedded in the ceiling? With a shorter wall and ceiling, artwork could be hung around eye level instead of requiring you to fly to see it or muck about with the camera controls (let's not talk about the places that disable flying).

Anyway we saw several very nice (but way oversized) houses and furnishings. But, we thought that the houses should fit on a 512 or 1024 lot - not a 4,000 meter one (with the extra tier fees). We would also prefer a bed that isn't 3 times as long as we are tall.

Lest you think this thread is just me whining - we're going to start experimenting with more proportional bulding and texturing this weekend. The purpose of this thread is to begin a dialog among the builders here about what constitutes "proportional". For example how high shoud a ceiling be to look good and still allow the follow camera to "see"? If you are texturing a wall, clothing, or whatever with ... say silk how detailed does the texture need to be? Silk is very fine grained cloth - maybe we'd be better served with the base color, a little noise and highlights/shadows.

Anyway, we're looking forward to the dialog and commentary. Let 'er rip .....

Yes, the proportions are the way they are primarily because of the camera angles (although I suppose you already know this) their is no "rule of thumb" but what many builders/architects/designers have agreed on in the past (correct me if I'm wrong) is that 1.5 X is normally where you want to be, now if you are building for the general masses take into account that an av could literally be any size, and some customizing might be in order once your product is purchased or put into use by someone other than yourself. I have spent the last year torturing prims as an Arch student, if you would like to conduct some experiments and play around with some of the structures I have built I would be intrested in swapping minds, I dont have much experience in textures (SL-wise) but I am pretty proficient in PS, as far as building a home on a 512 plot, yes it is feasible, with space left over, and fluid camera movements, let me know if you would be intrested

Yeah this annoys me too. Not sure why people find it so hard to keep proportion. If you build a staircase then walk your avatar up it and make sure it looks right. If you build a light switch then move your avatar next to it and and make sure its at an proportionate level. It's not rocket science so really don't know why people find it so hard.

A lot of that house requiring a 4000 meter plot has to do with the prims used to make the house. There are only 117 prims available for a 512 meter lot. That's really not a lot of prims if you want a very detailed building. There are ways of "saving" prims however those savings wind up costing in detail. It's pretty easy to build 4 walls using only one prim.........but you have a problem getting a door to get in without putting it on one corner and having it not the full hiegth of the wall. Or when you apply textures and adjust them to look relativily realistic on (say) the outside you go inside and they are all "off".........adjust those and your outside changes. Using one prim you have only one texture to stretch around the whole thing.........the outside diameter is different than the inside and you just cannot get them in sync. Close but not "right". It's a trade off.

I've found that 10 to 12 feet (a little over 3 to a little under 4 meters) work pretty good for me. But a taller avi might have a little trouble with the over the head angle of the camera as you observed.

I'm no artist or architect but I can see proportions and I agree many textures are way out of line for anything realistic. I make many of my textures and when I do them I try to remember the proportions in what a wall or floor might be......it's hard to know exactly since your texture is a square and most of the time you wall or floor is not. You can handle some of the distortion with the texture adjustment control in edit......but not all. What I do is try to visualize a regular 8 foot wall (about 2.75 meters) and how high the window top and how low the window bottom should be........the width is harder since the wall can be anything up to 10 meters (close to 33 ft) long. A simple fabric texture is even harder to make look right. A 512 X 512 pixel texture will look a whole lot different on a 2.75 meter by 5 meter wall and a 4 meter by 10 meter wall..........exact same texture, entirely different look.

I hope this amatuer has helped.

The main reason as Kepster says is camera angle.

In RL I've lived and worked in Victorian (I think) buildings for the last 5 years so 10-15ft high cellings, massive windows and oversized doors seem pretty natural to me.

I've had a few tries at converting RL floor plans into SL buildings. Horizontal distances generally need to be multiplied by at least 3x, and better 4x. Vertical floor-ceiling height needs to be in the 5-6m range for decent clearance for the camera to lay nice.

basically, any attempt to convert a real building into SL terms will look and feel really cramped. I rezzed some prims to describe the floor area of my RL apartment once. A SL sofa and 2 comfy chairs would not have been able to fit inside that space.

I did something similiar, rezzed a RL sized King Bed; it looked teeny.

I finally started trying to build furniture that at least was in proportion for my avie. For instance, a coffee table is approximately knee height... Not very elegant or precise perhaps, but a solution that at least is working for now.

A couple of other factors throw off the 'correct' proportions when building in SL.

Most important is that if you compare the height of prims in-world to your avatar's height, you'll find the avatar is 'too tall'. This is because the reported height of an avatar isn't the top of their head. It's their eye level! (Think about it from the game perspective, and this is the height the mouselook camera should default to.)

As a result, the 'average height' of an avatar in SL is somewhere around seven feet tall, as opposed to the real-world 5.5 to 6 feet tall average. So doors, beds and the like need to be 1.25 to 1.5 times the real-world equivalent height, in order to fit an average SL avatar.

Ceilings are a different issue. 3.5 to 4 meters would seem OK in most cases, though camera angles get a bit cramped with that. But if you offer a TP to someone while you're standing in a room that has 3.5 to 4 meter tall ceilings, your guest appears on the roof, or on the next floor up! This is because a teleport always targets a point about two meters above the ground, then allows you to settle to the surface. If their head is in the ceiling, they TP in higher, until there is no collision. So my rule of thumb is 5 meters for wall heights. Scale things like a 19th century home with 14 to 15 foot ceilings, and it looks fine. About 2x the standard Real World ceiling heights.

Floor area also needs to be 1.5 to 2x real scale, or there isn't enough room for camera angles, unless you stay in mouselook all the time. High ceilings help here, as you can look at things from behind and somewhat higher.

For designing furniture, the best bet is to build it exactly to scale, then scale it up to about 125 to 150 percent of that size, while comparing it to a default "Ruth" Avatar.

Yeah, those darned camera angles and ridiculously tall avatars...

I like to build my apartment walls in 6m increments, and it's still huge. But so far it feels about right . Anything much less than that, and the camera seems to be floating in between floors unless you zoom in on the back of your av's head. I think 6m is comfortable - it allows for some wiggle room with the floors/ceilings (depending on thickness) and doesn't leave me feeling claustrophobic.

If everyone is freakishly tall... then no one is freakishly tall. When I walk around with my 7 foot tall avvy the newbies are calling me petite. Compared to most buildings and houses all of our avvies seem rather small. If you remove all the numbers and measurements and just go by sight alone everything looks ok.

It all begins with avatar height. If all realistic avatars sized themselves down to RL heights, then almost all realistic SL creations could be made in RL proportions. The only exception to this would be architecture. That's because of the camera angle issue. But, because architecture cannot use RL proportions, does not mean that the rest of the trades must not use RL proportions too. The meter is a very useful unit of measure. It can be used to create artifacts that are an exact fit to their surroundings, to the avatars using them or wearing them, etc. The meter*1.25 or 1.5 or 2 or ... is not a very useful unit of measure. It's too imprecise. And this is where SL is at right now. All proportions are off. So I would agree with the OP.

The thing is, why give up the meter? It is so precise ... and so common. Everything in SL can be made in RL proportions. Everything except architecture. But this, IMO, should be regarded as an architecture issue, not a SL-wide issue. Architects of realistic builds must develop their own SL-specific proportion guidelines (e.g., ceilings must be at least 5m in height, etc.). They could also strive to use (or innovate) techniques that visually reduce space (e.g., use darker colors or large tiles to bring the walls in and the ceiling down, place furniture in compression areas of elevated platforms and hanging ceilings, etc.). As far as realistic SL is concerned, things could be so much more compatible and pleasant if we all sized ourselves down to RL heights and begun developing using RL proportions.

You seem to have missed my point about how the avatar model is very nearly incapable of replicating realistic human body proportions at normal height. The model needs to be about 1/3 to 1/2 taller in "meters" than normal in order for the proportions to work. Were everyone to downsize as you suggest, everyone would end up deformed.

Had the avatar been created from the beginning with its measurement units matching those used for land and prims, we wouldn't have this problem, but it wasn't, so we do. At this point, the only option is to build big, unfortunately.

The numbers are pretty unimportant though. It's all relative. As Bree said, if everyone's tall then no one's tall. The only part of the equation that doesn't work out is the size of the units, which we happen to call meters. Forget about the numbers, and it all works visually. As I said earlier, the meter in SL is way smaller than the meter in RL, compared to the size of a normally proportioned human being. To build in correct proportion in SL, you have to treat them that way.

I strongly disagree with your notion that somehow this just an architecture problem. It is absolutely an everything problem. Want some examples?

Have you played the NBC/Universal/Electric Sheep Company's Smokin' Aces game? I made the weapons for it. All the guns in the game are exact replicas of real guns (brand names were excluded for trademark reasons, of course, but the geometry of each models is straight from the real thing). Even though the replication is extremely precise, I couldn't use the actual measurements for the real guns or the models would have been way too small when held by the avatars. To come up with the right measurements, I had to match the RL handle size relative to an average real hand with the SL handle size relative to an average avatar hand. Needless to say, the result was the guns got bigger.

How much bigger are they? I never bothered to calculate the exact ratio (wasn't necessary), but I can pretty much guarantee you it's somewhere between 1.25:1 and 1.5:1. In other words, the "meters" that measure those guns are the same amount smaller than RL meters as the "meters" that measure everything else in SL.

I repeat, SL meters are disproportionate to RL meters. They're not the same thing.

Want another example? Got a ball point pen on your desk? Measure it, and you'll find it's 14-15 cm long. All the brands, Papermate, Bic, etc, fit somewhere in that range. Okay, now model it in SL, and keep it at that size. Place it in your (well proportioned) avatar's hand. You'll see that the pen looks almost microscopic. Now upsize it by about 50%, and you'll see that it looks just about right.

Again, meters in SL are way too small, and should not be relied upon as an accurate 1:1 unit of measure. What's important is that all buildings, props, vehicles, etc, are proportionate to the characters that are walking around. Use meters at 1:1, and you'll find everything looks tiny. Size everything to where it matches avatar size, and it will always look right. To hell with what the numbers say.

Chosen, plenty of SLers have downsized their avatars and they do not look deformed. My avatar is 5' 11" and she does not look deformed either. Now, perhaps you had some problems achieving the very specific hourglass shape that you were after. But I don't see this as a good enough reason to abandon all standards of measurement and just go by the eye. There are plenty of RL details about ourselves that we cannot accurately model in SL - faces, hair, fingers and toes, crotch and buttocks, etc. And shapes too. Just ask the men how they feel about their hourglass figures. So, I'd say just add one more shape to the list of impossible things and call it a day.

Both of your examples dealt with exact RL replicas and avatar hands. But, Chosen, hands can be scaled to RL dimensions. There is a slider just for hands. And that slider has quite a range. Why would a RL-proportioned Bic pen look "almost microscopic" when held in RL-proportioned avatar hands? It shouldn't. And it doesn't. I made a pen and I held it in my hands. It looked fine. I still don't see how this is not just an architecture issue.

I'd say that "which numbers are used is pretty unimportant," not that "all the numbers are pretty unimportant." I see numbers/standards are quite important. They could help bring some sort of uniformity to the grid, streamline development, increase quality, improve customer satisfaction, etc. There are plenty of reasons why RL (and internet) organizations, communities, etc. adopt standards. And most of these reasons apply here in SL too.

As someone who makes custom avatars of RL people at realistic human scales, I feel I must disagree. What you are saying is like telling Chip Midnight that a decent skin is impossible in SL.

EDIT: Sorry in advance if any of this sounds harsh. I've been up all night, and I've learned in the past that I sometimes tend inadvertently to sound less than friendly when I write on too little sleep. I'm way too tired right now to figure out if any part of this post shouldn't be there. Please read with an open mind.



First, how many women in RL are actually 5'11"? Very, very few, so you're already upsized. Second, take a good hard look at all your avatars that are within normal height range. I can guarantee you if you look critically you'll find that things like ankles and knees are completely out of proportion. Waist to hip ratio can be done correctly to a degree, but you're very limited in range.

As someone well versed in artistic anatomy, these things drive me nuts. Perhaps you're simply less sensitive to it.


That is soooooo the wrong attitude. There's nothing impossible about it. All that's required is to upsize a little, and many of those shapes that you find so impossible become much more achievable (especially if you take the further step of applying good shading in you skin and clothing to make up for the shortcomings of the extremely low poly count on the avatar mesh). For whatever reason, the morphs for the av model are clearly designed for maximum efficiency at a body height that is greater than that of a normal human, as measured in "meters".

As for things like hair, there's no system in the world that can "accurately model" hair, so it's kind of pointless to talk about it much in realtion to SL. Even Maya Hair, which is probably the most sophisticated 3D hair simulator on this planet isn't really "accurate". It relies heavily on illusion, not on actually modeling strands of hair.

I'm not sure what you feel is wrong with the fingers. They're not great of course, but as low poly models go, they're really not bad. I've seen far worse.

Toes in SL don't even exist, so as was the case with hair, there's not a whole lot of point in talking about them, I don't think.

In any case, neither hair, fingers, or toes have anything to do with proportion, so I'm not sure how you're trying to relate them in this context.


Dude, don't treat me like I'm retarded. Of course I'm aware that there's a slider for hand size. What I'm talking about is when the hands are correctly proportioned to a likewise correctly proportioned avatar body, the whole package is larger than life. Therefore, to look correctly sized in relation to the avatar, the pen has to get bigger too. It's pretty elementary.

Also, you seem to have missed my use of the word "average". I wasn't talking about any specific hand in either example. I quite clearly said "the average RL hand" and "the average SL hand". In SL and in RL, of course there will always be people whose hand sizes fall outside the normal average range, but most products aren't made for those people though in either world.

For example, in RL most people with small hands have trouble playing the piano, and many people with large hands have trouble using scissors. Of course you can get a piano with mini keys, and yes, there are scissors with extra large handles, but the vast majority of pianos and scissors and everything else are made to fit the normal average range of sizes. There's no reason not to do the same in SL just because the made up unit of measure that happens to be called a meter doesn't quite jive with it.

Seriously, would it really have made sense to decide that the numbers were more important than the functionality on those guns, and then had 90% of the people who tried to use them have them not fit? Call me crazy, but I think designing for the masses was the right move.


Of course numbers are important. You seem to have completely missed my meaning. Let me clarify. I was speaking in terms of relativity. The amount of units that make up an object's size is RELATIVELY unimportant when compared with how that size relates to the needs of the human user.

Units, any units, are totally arbitrary and their amount is unlimited. Body size, on the other hand, is quite finite. That makes body size the limiting reagent, the most crucial object of reference.

It is an undisputed fact that the average height an avatar, whether you like it or not, is larger than that of a real human, as compared to a "meter", right? Whether or not we agree on the reasons is a separate matter, but we do agree that the oversizing does exist, right? Well, that means that any object you make at 1:1 scale will appear small relative the average human in SL. That's elementary.

Well, think about this. Why is it that in RL a pen is 15cm long, or a door 80 inches tall, or a car 20 feet long? It's because those sizes are what fit with the average size of a human being. The centimeters and inches and feet and all that are RELATIVELY UNIMPORTANT by comparison. When they invented the door, they didn't say "We've got this thing called an inch. 80 is a cool number. Let's put 80 inches into the door." What happened was a door that happened to be 80 inches tall happened to be well sized for human needs so it became a standard.

Think about all other standards, and it's pretty easy to see that they all came into being in the same way. Every single one of them was derived out of functional necessity, not out of any love of numbers. The numbers are just an after thought, nothing more than a quantization to make the standard reproduceable. That's it.

For example, wall studs go 16 inches on center as a standard not because anyone has a particular fondness for the number 16, but because trial and error over time showed that that's the optimum distance for balancing wall strength with material use. Were we to change the size of the inch, the absolute distance between the studs wouldn't change along with it. We'd just end up using more inches if they got smaller or less if they got bigger. Again, the specifics of the numbers are unimportant compared to the functionality.

The same method of standardization applies in SL. It's about what fits with human needs. The question is what's the most important need? Is it to make sure an arbitrarily assigned unit of measure coincides with an equally arbitrary unit from the real world, or is it to ensure that things fit the body, such as it exists in SL? I would submit that if you believe it's the former, you're way missing the boat.

You can make all your models at 1:1 scale if it makes you happy, but be prepared to accept the fact that most people won't be able to use your stuff very well. Most of what you make will look and feel small to most people. If that's okay with you, that's your prerogative. Me, I'd rather go with what works best for as many people as possible.


As I said earlier, take a real good critical look at those "realistic human scales" of yours. How's that ankle size? How are the knees? How's your range of freedom when assigning the waist to hip ratio? I think you'll find that there are serious problems in there. The model just wasn't designed properly for what the rest of the SL world calls a "meter".

Since we're free to use as many "meters" as we want, but we're not free to use whatever body sizes we want, logic dictates that the important unit of measure is the average body size. That in no way means we shouldn't use exacting specifications and precise measurements. We absolutely should. We just can't expect that a unit of measure that happens to have a common name in two different worlds means exactly the same thing in both worlds. It doesn't.

As for your reference to Chip, I'm sure he appreciates the compliment that you feel he makes a "decent skin", but was such a reference really necessary? Yes, Chip's a talented artist (and a great guy), but by your own description, so are you. I think you'd do better to stand on your own merits than to try to compare yourself to others or to drag into the discussion names of people who are not involved here.

I agree with Chosen on how to deal with metres. They're barely yards in SL. "meter" is just a label to a virtual measurement that was intended to reflect a real one, but which doesn't.

A metre in real life is only relevant to how it measures up against an average human being. Someone drew two lines a distance apart and said "that's one metre."

That said, my avatar is 5'8 (5'2 by those lying height rulers ) and yes the shape is frustrating, but my obsession was with trying to keep to a realistic height, even if it's probably unrealistic because LindenMeters(tm) are short to the real ones. Heh

4-5 meters are where most of my floor heights are, for reasons of build efficiency as well as camera comfort. I made one a little lower and even my camera started to duck and swoop so that's about my limit. My friend was building a realistic house and bumped her face on the top of the door. I make 3 LindenMeters my rule for typical doors. I cheat more with sliding doors going full height. If someone needs 4096 to make a three bed house, then their talent doesn't lie in prim efficiency, maybe it's in detail work.

Last Friday I helped out Keystone Bouchard shoot a small machinima about building from architectural plans in SL. We were rezzing plywood on a 1:1 scale floorplan. It seemed so tiny and cramped. Keystone said for SL he builds 1.5xRL scales now. That said, it looked ok in mouselook, and the video looked ok.

A LindenMeter is 75-85cm. Keep that in your mind and it makes more sense. It's just a word for a measurement.

On hollow prims, some actual useful advice:
"the outside diameter is different than the inside and you just cannot get them in sync. Close but not "right". It's a trade off."

Asuming a hollow cube, If H is the number of horizontal repeats for an outside face, for the inside you need

R = (H x 4) / (hollow/100)
(cylinders skip the x 4 i think)

For the offset you need
R / 40

Rounding to 2dp on the repeats (can't be helped)
With 1 repeat on a 95 hollow prim you get 4.2 internal repeats with a 1.05 offset.

The principles of building in SL are different to RL.

i'm pretty tall standing next to ace, but i'm often the shortest one in the room when not with her. avatar sizes are wayyy out of rl proportion, but as long as we're proportional with each other there's nothing wrong with that and it all seems to work out. and being here a few years i haven't noticed any shift in the scale. avs were tall back in 2004 too and it all seems pretty stable. if i felt we were getting taller and taller over time i might have thoughts about scaling back to rl size or complaining or something.

so i do agree with chosen that we have a universal scale difference, maybe 1:1.3 or 1:1.5 or so.

there is another factor to consider in size differences, particulaly with architecture. speed of movement reduces distances greatly, especially in the horizontal. flying of course, but even walking is fast and it's impossible to take small steps or subtle movement. and like chosen said, just getting around with lag adds some to that. a 10x10m room takes no time to traverse in sl, and seems pretty small, even though in rl that's quite a large room and would take you longer to get from one end to the other.

i recreated my rl home once in sl. i had all the room measurements and used a 1:1.3 scale,. double checking all my conversions, and it came out tiny and cramped. even with the larger size. i could have used 1:1.5 maybe, but i think it still would have looked small.

so many another factor in sl living spaces is that we live in dream homes which are much bigger, and we get used to it. if you lived in a mansion then walked into my average home you probably would think it's cramped too.

just to clarify, the hollow portion is the setting as an integer, not as .95 (or whatever) or percentage as i initially assumed. i usually do it as the decimal version of hollow and toss out the /100. after that the calculations were spot on for me, and i don't have to guess at the inside repeats!

thanks ace, that's gonna save me from pulling out hair.

As a builder I have to say that I barely think of the numbers as metres. I do what I do in real life designing and consider scale in relation to body size. If body sizes are bigger than in rl then so are spaces, the actual numbers are not really relevant to me except as a way of precisely setting prim size and positioning to achieve the look I want.

Also many rl design tricks work very well. It is possible to make spaces seem bigger than they are just as it is in rl. I often use a higher ceiling to make a room feel much bigger than it is. Of course this has the side effect of accommodating camera views.

I personally feel that proportion and aesthetics are of far more use and interest in both avatars and builds than the actual numbers involved. In the end it is the visual effect that matters to me, not the mathematics behind them

[left]Man is the measure of all things.
-- Protagoras

And avatar scale has been wrong since beta.
-- me
[/left]

Yes, I am. Even with some fashion illustration background, I simply do not fret over the proportion of ankles and knee caps. So, point taken. Literal translation of RL meters into SL meters won't work well for high-quality avatar-making and general architecture.Dude, practice what you preach Ok, this is what I'd like to focus on. I take it that by "numbers" you mean "measurement standards." Alright then, what should we use? I suggested back in my first post that we use a "1 RL meter = 1 SL meter" system and you raised strong objections to it. Ok, so what then? You (or anybody else for that matter) have not suggested an alternate system. I hear talk about ratios of 1:1.25, 1:1.3, 1:1.5, etc., about the man being the measure of all things, but nothing concrete. And I would like something concrete. Many product designers would like something concrete. And the OP and countless of other SLers would appreciate something concrete. So, what should it be?

Let me make a second suggestion. How about this formula:

1 RL meter = [(x/AMH + y/AFH)/2] SL meters, where
x = SL height of male avatars when slider is at 50,
y = SL height of female avatars when slider is at 50,
AMH = average RL height of males, and
AFH = average RL height of females.

So, if x=2.25, y=2, AMH=1.7, and AFH=1.5 (all numbers are totally random), this formula would give 1 RL meter = 1.33 SL meters. So, would a formula like this do it? Probably not. For one thing, it does not take into account the speed of avatar movement that Parker and yourself raised. So, what then?

Now, since I like to stick to my guns, let me say that I'm pessimistic at the prospects of any system of standards that differs from the systemic one, or what's perceived as being the systemic one (95% of SLers understand 1 meter in their SLs to correspond to 1 meter in their RL lives), ever being widely adopted by the community. Many reasons for this: We are a very diverse group of individuals and agreement is hard to come by, technology changes rapidly (what if Avatar 2.0 that has been promised is introduced later this year?), the population is constantly infused with large numbers of new people who would not necessarily be aware of the existence of any such system, people may tire of working with ratios and go back to designing by the eye or using RL measurements and then scaling up (still imprecise), etc. This is partly why I suggested that we should all use the "1 RL meter = 1 SL meter" system and leave it at that. One system is better than no system (or a system that very few of us use). Now, fire away

It depends if we are trying to go for realism, or for heightened realism.

In animation, for example, you get a sort of heightened realism, with the movements exaggerated. It has to be larger than life, or it looks somehow miniscule, missable, unexpressive.

It may be that objects are similar in SL, particularly is they have movement in them. Let;s take a chest of drawers with one drawer that opens - you need to make the chest big, and with fair sized drawers, high colous contrast between the outside and inside of the drawer, abnd a good depth to it so that when it opens you can really apprehend an opening drawer.

There's a further reson for this, in the visual sense - i RL our cameras are fixed in our heads (eyes). In SL, except when we are in mouselook, our camera is way back behind us and over our heads - our field of vision is greater and it has a uniform focus, so we don't pick out or concentrate on particular areas and objects wthin it at one time. Thus, it is natural to make everything big, so that it impresses upon our SL field of vision.

Anothetr hing is that if you have a domestic object - say, a shower with anice shower animation - you want it big so that you can clearly see your avi having a shower without being too boxed in, and then you want it a little way away from the wall so cameras don't move through them... and so the whole thing scales up.

Just like in animated movies and cartoons, whether 'cartoony' or more realistic. It;s par tof making a simulated object shout "I am an actual object" at the beholder.

What ticks me off is that most BEDS I see for sale are a whopping 4 Meters long, or twice the normal length.

I found that a 3m (still hideously oversized) bed works best.

My Avatar is 180cm tall (6 ft). He looks very natural and not as anorexic as most other SL avatars (except that he has a blue tiger's head ^^)