I see this subject come up every so often in the forum, why did the Lab make things so big, not to-scale?
In the 2004 era of Second Life® (SL) the default avatars were 7’ for males and 6’ for females. Camera angles and settings were adjusted to give, in the Lab’s opinion, the best view. Buildings, doors, and furniture were designed to accommodate those conditions, basically the camera above and behind the avatar.
But why those settings?
We are legion…
It seems everything in SL played into making things big. Making the default avatars 7’ and 6’ tall is sort of a chicken and egg conundrum. Are things big because of the avatar or is the avatar big because of all the things?
Neither. I suspect the Lab put some thought into deciding on size and general scale. So, I think it was more of a planned thing than avatars or things making SL what it started as.
Paraphrasing Penny Patton (Cow) of Digital Pasture from 2011:
So… before large prims and efficient mesh, big avatars and double‑scale rooms made it easier to span space with fewer objects. The point being with prim limit per parcel, some builders used a small number of large structural prims instead of many small, detailed ones. They were working to avoid reaching the prim-limit.
New World Notes (NWN) (2012) pointed out the default camera settings created a feel of ‘cramped’ space in to-scale-buildings. Doors were larger than life and ceilings were higher to give the camera room. (The NWN website has moved to Patreon. So, while AI can find the old articles I can’t link you to them.) Inara Pey quotes NWN and provides her own take on the subject in: OF AVATAR HEIGHT AND SIZE. (2012) She covers much of the same thinking.
Originally in the early 2000s the Lab was trying to reduce network bandwidth requirements, render cost, and easy building in-world. Fewer prims and avatars per region did that. For the Lab is was Go Big, Go Fast.
Legacy – The Lab tries to keep legacy stuff working and compatible. The Lab lags behind residents in many ways. They often play catch-up. They may add a new feature. When doing so they try to take it in the way they expect we will use it. So, they make a nice road to the left and residents take the tiny trail to the right and turn it into a super-highway. Later the Lab adds the traffic signs. The old habits linger.
Several generations of Mesh Starter Avatars were oversized. This has caused new users to go with the BIG avatars and to think they are normal. Normal is NOT a word to be used with SL.
Habit – Designers just stayed with big because that what they had always done. New builders didn’t know better.
So, everything just sort of pushed the world to BIG.
Things Changed…
Penny Patton was early on one that pushed for smaller things. If I recall correctly that was from her considering region cost and how best to use the increasing prim limit. Economically paying prim tear was cheaper than adding a region.
And then there was Virtual Reality (VR). It was a thing a few years back. Even I have a VR headset, Samsung Gear. A huge rush to mesh and to-scale building in sued. But, the Lab quickly, or not so quickly – depending, that the SL system could not carry the render load of VR.
Viewer devs built some VR capable viewers. I even ran one. The result was for VR to work we really needed to-scale stuff. Things had to be proportional and stuff and avatars had to work together. The move for built-to-scale was on.
Then people realized that headsets REALLY suck. They get hot. We sweat. Makeup runs and hair gets mussed. They were too expensive. Fun and neat but not ALL THAT fun nor cool.
The Lab went with Sansar and designed it to be to-scale for VR. Today it is part of Steam. Current reports are on average current users is 3 with a peak of 283. Sad. But VR is mostly dead. Reserved for technical use where visualization is important. Think mostly medical.
In SL new people do not understand scale. Older players sort of understand. But basically, it is a personal choice thing. The Lab has apparently not set any goal to move toward building to-scale. They aren’t positioning new players with correctly scaled avatars, which would, I think, be a major step in correcting the size problem.
Those that realize as Penny did that you can put more in a region if it is to-scale are adopting to-scale. But it is not a have-to sort of thing.
The computer and network limitations that started as the SL impetus for BIG are gone. The typical network speed in the beginning of SL was about 2.3 Mbps. Today I run at 591.17 Mbps.
How to best adjust your camera
Second Life Camera Position Tips – 2011 – Things camera haven’t changed in 15 years… well… control-wise.
Changing your camera and using a smaller avatar makes for a better SL.
See:
- My articles on camera settings
- Articles on SIZE, all sorts of sizes
It wasn’t just that the starter avatars were big. A lot of the men wanted to be HUGE, and immediately moved their height slider to 100. (Some failed to adjust the rest of the avatar to match, leading to a lot of pinheaded men.) Women who interacted with them socially were forced to also get bigger; otherwise they would look silly dancing together.
Architecture is also a factor. If you use the default camera settings, as most do, 10×10 meters (a bit over 33×33 feet) is about the smallest size of room you can comfortably occupy; otherwise the camera angles get challenging and you can’t get a camera position that will let you see everybody. In real life that would be a HUGE room; few of us have rooms in our houses that even approach that size. The huge rooms mean that you also have to make furniture large; otherwise it looks like you have filled your house with doll furniture. And the huge furniture means that you also need large avatars, or else you look ridiculous when you sit on it.
Finally, large avatars are easier to design than small ones. The shape parameters are more forgiving. Being off by a point or two won’t make much difference on a seven foot avatar, but make the same error on a five foot avatar and you’ll see it. It took a while for people to figure out how to make more realistically sized avatars look good.
In the woman-oriented spaces where I spend most of my time now, it is the fashion to have more realistic sizes, often matched to the real life heights of the people who run them. (I have done that, measuring by standing next to a prim or moving the prim over myself rather than relying on the number in the shape editor; I’m 1.7 meters tall, or about 5’7″). When the Body Measurement System (made by Arnica Venus) became available, I got one of those to check my body proportions, and found that I am a curvy but not impossible 34C-24-38 — I guess my eye for design isn’t too bad.) We still wear ludicrously high heels, but many would also choose to wear those in RL if their bodies would tolerate them. But if I visit a place where lots of men hang out I look tiny.