Height Comparison Chart — Compare Heights in 2D & 3D

What the height comparison chart actually draws

The comparison tool on this page has one job: to draw people, characters, objects and buildings side by side at a scale you can trust. Every figure, whether you typed it in or picked it from the catalog, is stored as a single number in centimeters. Everything else on screen comes from that value: the silhouette, the axis labels, the difference ruler, the results table and the 3D scene. That design choice is what makes the chart honest. A 180 cm person is drawn exactly 1.2 times as tall as a 150 cm person, because both are measured against the same pixel scale and nothing is rounded before drawing.

This guide explains how that scale is chosen, how the silhouettes are built from published body proportions, how the parser understands heights typed in almost any format, what the 3D and eye-level views add, and how to get trustworthy numbers in the first place. If you just want a quick number, the height difference calculator or the height converter may be faster. The chart is the tool to use when you want to see a difference.

How the scale is chosen

The 2D chart works out its scale in two passes.

Vertical fit. The tool finds the highest point on the chart, which is the tallest figure plus any elevation you gave it, and divides the available plot height by that number. The result is pixels per centimeter. On a plot 600 pixels tall with a 190 cm person as the tallest figure, one centimeter is about 3.2 pixels, so a 170 cm friend is drawn 536 pixels tall and a 2 cm difference is still visible as six or so pixels.

Horizontal fit. Each silhouette also has a natural width, so a long line-up can overflow the screen. The tool then shrinks the scale step by step (a binary search over 24 iterations) until everyone fits side by side, but never below half of the vertical fit. Past that point it keeps the figures tall and lets you scroll sideways. That is deliberate: a chart of 20 basketball players squeezed to postage-stamp size would hide the differences you came to see.

Tiny figures. When a landmark joins the chart, the scale changes dramatically. The Burj Khalifa is 828 m to its architectural top, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, which is about 473 times the height of a 175 cm person. On a 600-pixel plot that person would be drawn 0.13 pixels tall. Any figure shorter than 18 pixels is therefore marked as "tiny" and gets a pointer and label above it, so it never vanishes.

Axis labels. Gridlines are picked from "nice" steps (1, 2, 2.5 or 5 times a power of ten) so you get labels such as 25 cm, 50 cm or 100 m rather than 37.2 cm. In feet-and-inches mode the steps are 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 6, 12, 24, 36 or 60 inches, and above 1,000 cm the labels switch to meters or whole feet. With "both" selected, a second axis on the right shows imperial units against the metric axis on the left.

Silhouettes built from body proportions

A height chart is only convincing if the figures look like people of that height. The silhouettes here are drawn procedurally, in a box 100 units tall, and then scaled to each figure's height. Their proportions follow the segment-length model published by Drillis and Contini in 1966 and reproduced in David Winter's biomechanics textbook, which describes the standing body as fixed fractions of stature (H).

An adult silhouette is about 7.5 head-heights tall: the head occupies the top 13 units of the 100-unit box, and the eye line sits at roughly 93.5 percent of stature. A child silhouette uses a head 17.5 units tall, about 5.7 heads in total, and compresses the body below it, because young children really do carry a much larger head relative to their height. Male, female and neutral outlines are interpolations of the same set of points, so the neutral figure sits exactly halfway between the other two.

Weight changes width, never height. If you enter a weight, the tool computes body-mass index (kg ÷ m²) and widens or narrows the outline by the square root of BMI ÷ 22, clamped between 0.82 and 1.5. With no weight entered it assumes a typical BMI: 23 for the male figure, 21.5 for the female figure, 22 for neutral and 16.5 for a child. A 180 cm, 90 kg person has a BMI of about 27.8, so the outline is about 12 percent wider than the default. The head widens by only 30 percent of that change, which keeps heavier figures from looking cartoonish. If body shape is what you care about, the 3D body visualizer goes much further.

Typing heights in any format

The height box uses one parser for every field on the site. It accepts the formats people actually type and converts them to centimeters using the exact international inch. Since 1 July 1959 the inch has been defined as exactly 25.4 mm, according to the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, so a foot is exactly 30.48 cm and nothing is lost in conversion.

The tricky case is a bare decimal between 3 and 8.99. Most people who type 5.11 mean five feet eleven inches, not 5.11 feet (which would be 5′1.3″), so a decimal part of one or two digits no greater than 11 is read as inches. Anything else, such as 5.75 or 6.333, is treated as fractional feet. Values of 9 and up are assumed to be centimeters.

The 3D view and the eye-level camera

Flat charts are precise, but they hide something everyone notices in real life: how tall someone looks depends on where your eyes are. The 3D view places every figure on a measured ground grid, lit like a small stage, and lets you orbit, zoom and jump between preset cameras for front, side and top views. The camera uses a 40-degree field of view, close to a normal photographic lens, so the perspective doesn't exaggerate anyone.

The most useful preset is eye level. Pick any person and the camera moves to stand in front of the line-up at that person's eye height, looking straight ahead with a level gaze. Because the eye line of each silhouette sits at about 93.5 percent of its height, a 160 cm viewer sees from roughly 150 cm, and a 200 cm viewer from about 187 cm. Switch between the two and the same line-up changes character: from the shorter viewpoint, a tall friend's chin is above the horizon line; from the taller one, you look down onto the tops of heads. It is the fastest way to understand why a 20 cm gap feels much bigger in conversation than it looks in a photo.

The 3D scene loads only when you switch to it, so the basic chart stays fast on phones.

Adding your own photo

You can also place a real photo in the line-up. After choosing an image, you drag two lines: one to the top of the head and one to the soles of the feet. Then you enter the real height. The tool treats the span between the lines as that height and scales the whole image to match, clipping it to the marked region so it stands on the same ground line as everyone else. The photo is opened as an in-memory object URL. It is never uploaded, it is not included in share links, and it disappears when you close or reload the page.

The scaling is only as good as the photo. Measuring from a single image is a well-studied problem in computer vision. The classic paper by Criminisi, Reid and Zisserman (1999) showed that true heights can be recovered from one picture only when the image provides geometry such as a vanishing line and a reference measurement. A casual snapshot doesn't, so for best results:

• Photograph the person standing straight on flat ground, full length, with the feet visible.
• Hold the camera at roughly waist to chest height and level, not tilted down from above.
• Stand back and zoom in slightly rather than shooting up close with a wide lens, which stretches whatever is nearest to the camera.
• Mark the top of the skull, not the top of a hairstyle, unless you want the hair included.

Sharing, exporting and limits

Every chart is stored in its address, so the link is the save file. Each figure becomes one f parameter: catalog entries are written as e. plus their slug, and custom figures as c. followed by the height in centimeters to one decimal, a gender code (m, f or o), the name, and optionally a color from the 8-color palette. Two more parameters record the unit (u=cm or u=ftin) and the view (v=2d or v=3d). A chart of you against Lionel Messi is therefore a short, readable URL that works without an account or a server-side database.

A chart holds up to 24 figures so labels stay legible. Export renders the same SVG used on screen to a PNG at twice the base size: 1920 × 1080 for a 16:9 landscape post or 1080 × 1920 for a 9:16 story. If the line-up is wider than the frame, the export scales everything down to fit instead of cropping anyone.

Getting accurate heights into the chart

The drawing is exact; the inputs are where error creeps in. Three habits make a big difference.

Measure barefoot, like a survey. The US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) measures standing height on a stadiometer with shoes and hair ornaments removed, heels together, the back of the head, shoulder blades, buttocks and heels touching the backboard, and the head in the Frankfort plane, meaning the line from the ear canal to the lower edge of the eye socket is level. The participant takes a deep breath, which straightens the spine, and the headpiece is lowered firmly onto the hair. At home, a flat wall, a hardback book held level and a tape measure come close.

Measure at a consistent time. Height shrinks during the day as the spinal discs compress. A 1986 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine by Leatt, Reilly and Troup recorded a mean daily variation of 14.4 mm, which is more than a 25 km run took off. Morning heights are the tallest.

Treat listed heights with care. Catalog heights come from cited sources, but not every source measures barefoot. Professional basketball is a good example of how listings drift: until 2019, NBA teams controlled their own roster heights, and the league then required physician-certified, shoes-off heights for every player. Many celebrity heights have never been measured publicly at all. The celebrity heights and character heights hubs show the source and any notes for each figure.

Worked examples

A big gap between two people. Kevin Hart is listed at 158 cm and Yao Ming at 229 cm. The chart draws them 71 cm (about 28 inches) apart. Yao is 44.9 percent taller, and because Hart's height is 69 percent of Yao's, the top of Hart's head reaches roughly Yao's chest line. That's consistent with the body-proportion table above, where the chest sits at 72 percent of stature.

The average couple. NHANES measured US men aged 20 and older at a mean of 175.1 cm and women at 161.2 cm between 2021 and 2023. Add both as custom figures and the difference ruler shows 13.9 cm, or about 5.5 inches. The top of the shorter figure's head reaches about the taller one's mouth. To see how either height ranks nationally, try the height percentile calculator.

A person and a monument. The National Park Service gives the Statue of Liberty as 92.99 m from the ground to the tip of the torch, pedestal included. A 175 cm person drawn beside it is about 1/53 of its height, so the chart zooms out to meters, keeps the person labeled with a pointer, and the axis switches its ticks to a 10 or 20 m step.

When to use a different tool

The comparison chart is best for seeing several heights at once. For one specific job, a dedicated page is usually quicker:

• Exact gap between two people, including where one person's head reaches on the other: the height difference calculator.
• Unit conversion only: the height converter, or the cm-to-feet and feet-to-cm reference charts.
• How a height compares with a population: the height percentile calculator for US adults and children, or average height by country for 200 countries.
• Children's growth: the growth chart and the adult height predictor, which use CDC reference data and published prediction methods rather than a drawing.

Whatever you compare, the same rule applies: the chart will show the numbers exactly as entered, so the better the measurement, the more the picture tells you.