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Even in Atmosphere, Size Matters!
Have you ever completed what seemed to be the perfect world, only to discover that once it's published, everything appears just a little too big for the default guy avatar (even though you thought you were building to scale), while at the same time, the AvLab people (Curious Labs) seem almost monstrous in your environment? Now that we have a grid system available I decided to get a better perspective on measurements and proportions for building in Adobe Atmosphere.
Prior to the current builder preview version we have had to sort of kludge together a measurement system based on the size of the builder primitives. It had been calculated that each atmo unit is equal to a foot. Also, we knew that a box is equal to two atmo units, and that the height and width of a wall to be equal to 10 atmo units.
However, the standard belief that the default guy's height (which is used in the player view of the builder) to be six feet is incorrect. As you can see in these images, he's actually quite a bit shorter. Comparatively, it's been said that the AvLab avatars seem to be about 10 feet tall, although they are actually not much farther off the 6 foot mark (in the opposite direction) than the default guy is.
So, if you want to get realistic proportions while building in Atmosphere, it would be good to start with a few statistics. The average human height for a male is 5'9" and 5'4" for a female. That would equal 5.75 atmo units for a male and, well, speaking from the perspective of a 5'5" tall person, if you want to reflect real world conditions, don't worry about designing for a woman's height as nobody typically does in in real life anyway. (If you are a woman disagreeing with me now, just think about the last time you sat in a car or airplane seat where the head rest was actually comfortable.)
Anyway, back on topic... In the example I've selected, I chose to use basic avatars with the standard poses from AvLab. I found it a bit odd that the female avatar is actually a little bit taller than the male, however this could be due in part to the pose of the avatars (the male slouches a bit). It's been suggested that the oversize avatars can be reduced to more appropriate proportions either in the AvLab program or by using the buttons in the player control panel. However as you can see the reduced size AvLab figure's eye-point in this wire frame image is still published at the same position as taller ones. Also, even if the user should choose to decrease the size of their AvLab avatar's appearance in the control panel, the camera (eye point) will remain in the same location.
So, what is a builder to do to accommodate such a variety of sizes? Well, since the only definitive size comparison is 1 atmo unit equals 1 foot, I believe it's best to continue to build to that scale, despite the oddly sized avatars (and perhaps we can convince Adobe to give the poor default guy a half foot height boost). Until then, you can always reset your default avatar URL in the builder to one with a more standard eye level.
I thought it would also be helpful to have some basic furniture sizes as a reference when building, since going just by what looks right can be misleading. So I've compiled a table below of a few common furniture items. For those of you who are more familiar with the metric system, remember that 12 inches (30.48 cm) = 1 foot (0.3048 meters) = 1 atmo unit. If you need conversions from something else (perhaps a bee space or a light year) check out this site: http://www.onlineconversion.com/length_all.htm.
| Furniture Item | Height |
| Desk | 30 inches |
| Chair (seat height) | 18 inches |
| Dining table | 30 inches |
| Dining room cabinet | 34-36inches |
| Coffee table | 16-18 inches |
| Console table | 34-36 inches |
| Display cabinet | 84-96 inches |
| Bedside table | 24-26 inches |
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| Kitchen Item | Height |
| Refrigerator | 66-72 inches |
| Kitchen Island | 34-36 inches |
| Bar Stools | 24-30 inches |
| Bed Sizes and Dimensions |
| Twin Mattress | 39" wide x 75" long |
| Queen Mattress | 60" wide x 80" long |
| King Mattress | 78" wide x 80" long |
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As a footnote, I found a great online tool that could be very helpful when planning the layout of a room before building it in Adobe Atmosphere: http://www.jordansfurniture.com/roomplanner.asp. It's a Flash based room planner that will let you arrange a room, adjusting the walls and furniture sizes. It will even give you a print-out of the room you create with the dimensions of the furniture as you have specified.
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