Land of the Giants...

It was something that I have thought several times, but it was only when Penny Paton commented on the Linden First Home Blog that I decided to actually take the bull by the horns and DO something about it.

Her post, that got me thinking was

"You know what would increase interest in land ownership overall? Making it possible for people to do more with their land! This is easier than you'd think, too.

Listen to this. Currently, most avatars in SL are a quarter, to 1/3 taller than is realistic. We're talking avatars that are seven feet, to almost nine feet tall, based on SL's own built in scale. Avatars this large need more space.

On top of that, even, the SL camera is very poorly placed. It sits high above you, looking down at an angle. Even if you zoom in all the way, only the very tip of your avatar's head stays in view. Of course, the SL camera does not play well with prims getting in the way. So what do people do? They raise ceilings in their already huge builds. Of course, things don't look right stretched upwards like that, so they increase the area of their build even more until it looks right to them.

Anyway, the end result is that buildings in SL are massively over sized to compensate for the camera and our huge avatars.

A little bit of math.

Without resorting to megaprims a 10x10m room requires 3 prims if you go absolutely bare bones. On prim for the floor, one for the ceiling, and one for the walls. Cut the wall prim right and you even have a door. Heck, you can cut a prim out by making the floor and ceiling one prim, cut and hollowed. So a 10x10m room requires 2 prims.

Scale that same room up to 20x20m, again without resorting to megaprims. Your bare bones room now requires 14 prims. That's a pretty big jump, isn't it? Do you see what I'm getting at, here?

You can argue that megaprims help with saving prims, but they're not officially supported and come with their own set of limitations and problems. In fact, they're just as likely to encourage a builder to make things even larger, because they can't find a megaprim that's just the right size. And, of course, even assuming larger prims ever did become officially supported, sims are one size only and that's not likely to change. Area is a finite resource, just like prims.

So, when avatars are so much larger, and buildings are up-scaled even more than that, sim size is effectively cut in half.

Linden Lab could effectively make sims twice as large, make that 512m "First Home" parcel effectively twice as large. This applies to vehicles, too. If vehicles were made to scale, instead of made drastically larger to fit our huge avatars and huge roads, then they would have twice the area to drive/fly/sail around in.

Skeptical? Take a floor plan for a house or apartment. Stretch it out so that it matches SL's scale. throw a bunch of plywood cubes at it until you have all the walls, kitchen counters, and all that in place. Try walking around in there. Chances are, your avatar won't even fit through the door. If you do manage to get inside, everything will seem extremely cramped.

Not so if your avatar was the size of a real person, and the camera was positioned so that it wasn't constantly fighting with the ceiling prims.

Afterwards, compare that to-scale floor plan build to your average SL home, or even one of these Linden provided homes once we're able to get a good look at them. Compare how much land they require. How many rooms.

I think you'll see my point. Linden Lab should make a serious effort to encourage better use of scale. They can do this in three ways.

First, provide correct avatar height in the appearance editor. Several open source viewers do this already. This feature needs to be in the official viewer.

Second, scale down the avatars in the Library. If all new residents start out with avatars made to realistic size, then the rest of the grid will eventually follow.

Third, fix the camera. Look at how the video game industry is doing it. Look at some of the camera attachments people in SL have made to relocate their camera. SL isn't Diablo, or The Sims. They're more connected to their unique avatar. The camera should be set up with that in mind.

If you're serious about helping people get the most out of SL, you should seriously consider resizing objects in the Library. Who has ever seen a 1x1m fruit bowl? Give people some realistically sized furniture to get started with, and to compare with their own creations.

All of this, given enough time for the existing userbase to change (and it wouldn't happen overnight) would have the additional benefit of helping SL look a lot nicer. If you're using fewer prims to build your dream house, that leaves you with more prims to furnish and decorate it. And now that we can do so much more with each prim thanks to sculpts, every prim saved really counts.

You might want to look at the size of these "Linden Homes". Toss on a 5'5" to 5'10" bodyshape, move your camera to a lower, more immerse kind of view, and see how big these houses really are."

And she is right, ever since I first started in SL, it struck me how tall everyone was, how huge things were, it struck me again when I tried to adapt RL house blueprints into SL, it just didn't work... Part of this is as the poster in the SL forums says, the camera is the wrong place which means that most people then build things to accommodate the camera. There are various gadgets available to "correct" the camera problem, which I have yet to try but I am starting to do some research on and I will report back when I have something to say.

So last night, I decided that it was now or never to start changing MY Secondlife experience for something a little more realistically proportioned. Firstly with the aid of a Height detector (Thanks Pip for dropping one on me)I checked how tall my Avatar was, and she came out at about 9ft something. I immediately went into edit my appearance and re sized my avatar to a far more realistic 5ft 8" (which is a couple of inches off my RL height) - amazingly this is just 40% of the height of the shape I use for her...

Immediately I started to notice how the things around me were ridiculously over sized... when they had looked perfectly normal before. The farm fence I had brought and put down was suddenly towering over me, as well as my horse, so I went about downsizing it to a more normal height. When I go walking, fences come to about chest height, and horses can look over them rather then through them, which is what now happens at my little home in SL.

The next step for me, as a builder, is to start looking at my creations, and re-making them in more realistic sizes. It is going to be difficult for awhile while so many others seem to cater for the over sized giants that roam SL, and I urge others to join me in this new way of thinking, this new idea to make our SL a little more real.

I have no problem if you want to be someone of Hagrid's proportions, but surely there must be other like me out there searching for that little bit more room and realism.