This is a preliminary presentation of aggregate avatar data collected via the avatar Loubottin in Second Life. Explanations, additional charts, and more material will be forthcoming once I have time to work out how to better present the information in a sane, understandable way. Pardon our dust! If you have urgent questions, please feel free to get in touch.
"Sightings" represent the number avatars "seen" during the course of a month. An avatar can be considered "seen" only once in a 24-hour period; any figure for the current month is a number-to-date. These totals inform all date-based tables here: if you want to know how many avatars were considered for avatar height averages in September 2018, this is where you'd find that total.
Second Life avatars report their "body shape" as a decimal number between zero (female) and one (male). As you can see, virtually all avatars are either a zero or a one; intermediate values apparently cannot be created by inworld tools and, as such, are exceedingly uncommon.
This graph shows the average age of sighted avatars in years at the time they were seen, over time. The lines above and below the average age represent one standard deviation across all sightings for a time period. Yes, that's maths, but don't be scared: basically, it means that if the group of avatars sighted in a timeframe is reasonably representative of SL as a whole then 68 percent of all avatars fall into the indicated range above and below the average.