Measuring the unmeasurable

Just yesterday, I wrote about an area of metrology that’s entirely new to me. Although I have alluded in Measure Twice, Cut Once before to atomic-level metrology, I was yet to encounter it. I’ll be the first to admit that when I found myself preparing to write about Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, I had to do a considerable amount of research to even begin to understand what NMR is, let alone what its applications are. If you don’t know what NMR is, in layman’s terms it's a very powerful magnet that is used to identify the chemical structure of a sample. Essentially, if you end up with a material and you don’t know what it is, you use an NMR spectroscope to identify it.

Understanding NMR also got me wondering about measurement in fields that seem unapproachable. I had never really thought about how a material can be chemically identified and I think the average person probably isn’t aware of NMR machines. I don’t know if I’ve ever questioned how the size of an atom is measured, but that seems like such an unapproachable, theoretical subject that, after yesterday’s research-rabbit-hole, I will leave that for another day.

Instead, I had the pleasure of researching another sort of metaphysical measurement for a personal interest of mine. As I finished my university degree during the pandemic, I at one point found myself looking for new accommodation in the middle of the strictest lockdowns that we had. A lot of letting agencies, in an effort to stand out amongst the many properties with poor quality pictures available, started using 3D scanned virtual tours to allow for virtual viewings when a physical visit to a property wasn’t possible. It reminded me of video game environments.

So I started thinking about metrology in video games. How do you measure a virtual, fictional world that is artificially constructed? How important is it to measure something virtual and fictional? Obviously you want consistency in your experience: an adult shoe and a tin of beans shouldn’t be the same size. But often, the sense of scale is distorted. A big factor in this is the fact that the human visual field is about 170 degrees, while your peripheral vision covers about 100 degrees of this. Looking through a monitor in the eyes of your game character has a similar effect to wearing a pair of horse blinders, distorting the sense of scale around you in a video game. Other things affect it as well, such as the amount of space your character takes up in the world, which means that the interiors of buildings often need to be made larger than their real-life counterparts.

I remember reading somewhere that in one of the Call of Duty games, a challenge for the animators was to make the sprinting animations look natural, because the actual in-game speed of a character sprinting was almost a hundred miles an hour. This was because a realistic sprinting speed (the average athlete’s sprint is about 24km/h) would feel incredibly slow to the player. I couldn’t find that original information, but I did find this interesting graphic comparing the running speed of some games. As it turns out, it’s not uncommon for a human character to sprint at over 200km/h.

I mentioned in the first instalment of this series how one of my favourite games, Kingdom Come: Deliverance (KCD for short) by Warhorse Studios, used a satellite height map as the basis for their environment. The idea was to have a game that is as historically accurate as possible, set in Bohemia in the year 1403. As a history graduate with a passion for the Middle Ages,  I loved the idea of a real-world terrain being used as the game environment, not unlike those virtual tours of rental properties. In KCD, the area that you can explore is about 16 square kilometres. Nonetheless, it still portrays a real-life area that’s significantly larger than that. To fit the scope of the story within the limits of video games, the developers stripped out areas that were considered sparse or empty, and squished some of the settlements closer together. So it’s not a 100% faithful representation of that area in real life, although it certainly feels like Henry, the protagonist, walks a long way from one settlement to another. I’m hoping the satellite height map is something that Warhorse will bring back for the sequel (likely set around Trosky Castle, pictured above), though a speedometer for Henry’s horse might take it a little too far. If you’re interested in KCD’s development, there’s a playlist of their making-of here.

I’ve digressed a fair bit, but what I’m trying to unwrap here is how measurement is perceived. It can make the unapproachably miniscule approachable. But it can also distort the perceived realism of something, such as the insane running speed in video games. I certainly felt my reality was distorted when the rental property I ended up in was a lot smaller than it looked in the pictures.