Monday, January 13, 2014

Perspectives II: Return of the Disproportion

The door to my brother's cabin in Nangrim is 2.8m tall. Perusing the Home Depot Website, the average front door for a Real Life home is 80" (2.032m). This matches up with the doors in my Real Life home. So why does this one seem to friggin' big to me? My avatar is only a few inches taller than my Real Life self.



The Builder's Tape Measure (which you'll find in Inventory > Library > Objects > Household) agrees that 2.8m is the proper height for a door opening in Second Life.

All this seems perfectly fine in Mouse Look, just like how I see things iRL. That's the way it is supposed to work, right? So the camera position is what makes the difference. Here's a comparison of the normal Second Life view to one where the Camera Controls were used to adjust the pitch so that the camera was as the avatar's eye level.

Standard View
Pitch-Adjusted View
There is no easy way with the Official Viewer's controls to make the latter the default view, though some Third-Party Viewers do have such optional adjustments. Scripted "cameras" are available, notably for Tinies and other other-than-standard size avatars. But seeing Our World from above and behind as we do instead of at nominal eye level as in RL is probably explains why we make our avatars so disproportionately large.

None of this explains why the books on his shelves look far to big, too.


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