Oculus needs smaller avatars in Second Life

This is the Berlin 1920 area in Second Life is testing for Oculus Rift. They scaled part of the environment to fit the Oculus Rift immersive environment. It also implies one should downsize one’s avatar (avatars are typically unrealistically big in Second Life) – but one can use the Oculus Rift headset everywhere in this virtual world, even though it is not really optimized for it. What I noticed here was that some objects did not render in my Oculus (some furniture such as a couch in an otherwise interesting Berlin 1920 house).

This is the notecard about this place:

Welcome to the Oculus Rift and Real Scale Test area.

In this little corner of Second Life you can explore a street, a bar and a house that have all been build to a real world scale.
A lot of places in Second Life have been build to different ideas of scale, often just guesses or estimations based on how large some of the avatars are.
By using a realistic scale, things feel more natural.
We use the scale of the “prim”, the building blocks of Second Life, translating real world scale straight into Second Life Centimeters.

When using the Oculus Rift, realism and realistic scale becomes very important.
You will be seeing Second Life trough the eyes of your avatar, while normally you would see the virtual world trough a camera view high above the head of your avatar.
This makes visiting a lot of places in SL a strange experience as doors and ceilings appear to be made for giants.

This Test area allows you to see what the use of realistic scale looks and feels like without having to change your avatar or your avatar’s clothes so you can visit the actual 1920s Berlin sim.
If you would like to visit an entire city build to this scale and with immersion as one of its main goals, please change into some of the (free) 1920s clothes and get on the train behind the little station.

If you want to return to this place at a later time, you can use this slurl or this landmark;
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/1920s%20Berlin/243/207/753

I’d appreciate it if you wrote down your experiences and shared them with me, perhaps for my blog.
And if you’re interested in discussing the potential of using the Oculus Rift in Second Life, join us on facebook;
https://www.facebook.com/oculuslife


With regards,

Jo Yardley
The 1920s Berlin Project

It sure is a place to keep an eye on…

This work by rolandlegrand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International