When I first joined Second Life, the one thing that drove me away from the platform was the crazy disregard to the humble meter. While there is a very reliable metric system background to the world, people simply blatantly ignore it. By and large, they still do. It still drives me insane.

While it is easy to ignore the scale requirements if you’re used to working in feet and inches, a 2-meter woman will never really sit well with a non-American. It’s not that American people are that tall; it’s that Americans didn’t grow up using the metric scale units.

America is one of three nations that still uses the Imperial System as their main measuring system. Barleycorns, picas, crazy units like horses asses are still in vogue on that side of the bond. NUTS.

How tall are people?

Quoting BBC: “When it comes to height, Dutch men and Latvian women tower over all other nationalities, a study reveals. The average Dutchman is now 183cm (6ft) tall, while the average Latvian woman reaches 170cm (5ft 7in).” (Converted to meters, that’s 1.82 meters and 1.70 meters, as should be apparent but might not be. Every metric unit, apart from 8-multiplied bit, is just multiplications and divisions of 10… Because Americans built computers and they just love doing complicated maths, and thus couldn’t add two more bits into computers like a normal person would have. (Trying to be funny here.))

I size my avatar to my RL height and resize every object I buy to its real-life equivalent size. It takes me ages to do this, but I do it because the scale would otherwise ruin the joy of my scenes. I stand 1.73 meters tall – taller than the women in the tallest nation in the world, and I am a midget among Second Life avatars.

When in real life I go to the supermarket, I will pass maybe 3 men who are taller than I am. When I go to a Second Life venue, the avatars shorter than I am are mostly tinies, but SOMETIMES I find the odd occasional scale-realistic fellow avatar; usually also women for obvious reasons, but sometimes, there are realistically sized men – I find them more self-confident and thus attractive than the insecurity-stretched male avis with tiny hands I see everywhere normally.

I want to SEE YOU.

I don’t mind it, of course, if your avatar is 2.01 meters tall because you, in real life, are 2.01 meters. That’s so genuinely who you are. People that tall invite comments. “WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?! Did your mother feed you steroids?!” They exist, but not commonly. People that tall KNOW OF IT. They live with it every day. They are DIFFERENT, not the norm.

That said, I’ve always hated my stupid big nose in real life. You know what was the first thing I had to get right in my avatar, after height and hair, of course? Yeah. I wanted to find a mesh head with that stupid big nose. (I still haven’t found a head that would also rock stupid folded eyelids along with a stupid big nose. LeLutka Zora is near perfect, but has too beautiful eyelids. 😀 I need man-eyelids to go with my man-height, lol.)

I’m not nit-picking. The size anarchy is INSANE

You might think that I’m nagging about small differences in what is realistic and what isn’t. I’m not. Often, I have to reduce the size of a furniture or a building by over half. There are some crazy big pieces around.

A sim is realistically a city block and a bit – depending on the city. A little bigger than a New York city block. A 512 square parcel should comfortably fit 2 single family homes with gardens or 4 town houses built wall-to-wall. Sizes like this waste land area. You do not need a living room the size of a warehouse!

Disproportionate.

Not only are the avatars generally speaking entirely too big, they are also entirely disproportionate. Tiny feet, tiny hands, short arms are common, and overly elongated legs make Second Life “human” avatar look ridiculous. They’re not human avatars. I don’t know what species they are, but they’re not current day human. Maybe in a million years, people.

This makes animations not work too well. Clearly, however, mocap animations are often created with a tall man of nearly 2 meters and a short woman of 1.5, to make them match the height differences in Second Life avatars, but I would so prefer scenes that actually look like they might happen one day in real life. Men who are just a little over 1.8 if they’re lucky, often 1.7 meters, NOT a very rarely seen 2 meters!

Sure it’s a fantasy world – but without a “normal” there is no fantasy scale.

The problem is of course that it is a fantasy world and as such, who can impose rules on people? The avatar scaling allows for a lot of madness for a reason, for example. We need giants in this world. But if everyone is as big as a giant, then what is a giant?

Without “normal” there is nothing to contrast the “fantasy” to.

Avatars are easy to size to the furniture.

This is the thing tho. Creators create furniture to the average size of avatar because they know the end-user is potentially less skilled than the creator. This is true, but getting a realistically sized avatar shape is a lot easier than creating furniture and readjusting the animations to suit it is TERRIBLY difficult and time consuming.

The end-user trusts the creators to  have some modicum of realism in the scale they use, and they think they “must be wrong” about their avatar’s true height. They’re not. The avatars are crazy big, and the furniture and houses are even bigger.

When the end-user cannot make the piece any smaller by dragging it’s corners, they assume that should be the intended “minimum/realistic size.” Often, it’s nowhere near still, and needs a script to get past the minimum prim-thickness which is 1 centimetre… (About half a thumb width.)

An avatar can switch between shapes pretty easily. I personally have a “Big Me” saved for when I want to play along to crazy scene sizes, but even my Big Me is only 1.85 meters tall or so.

Rigged clothing will resize in a snap to any size avatar, but furniture and houses need a highly skilled creator to modify them to size.

I’d very much like to urge furniture creators to figure out how to scale their furniture better, and offer a 1:1 piece alongside of their usual scale, maybe.

Sure, it’ll take you twice the time, but it takes you twice the time or every end-user down the line spending that same time adjusting those animations again for you. Most creators use the same animation cube for all pieces anyway so… You know. Please stop being lazier than lazy.