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The correspondence between rotations and quaternions can be understood by first visualizing the space of rotations itself. Two separate rotations, differing by both angle and axis, in the space of rotations. Here, the length of each axis vector is relative to the respective magnitude of the rotation about that axis.
which is a quaternion of unit length (or versor) since ‖ ‖ = + + + = Most importantly, the above equations for composition of rotations are precisely the equations for multiplication of quaternions =. In other words, the group of unit quaternions with multiplication, modulo the negative sign, is isomorphic to the group of rotations with ...
Quaternions also capture the spinorial character of rotations in three dimensions. For a three-dimensional object connected to its (fixed) surroundings by slack strings or bands, the strings or bands can be untangled after two complete turns about some fixed axis from an initial untangled state. Algebraically, the quaternion describing such a ...
The conjugate of a product of two quaternions is the product of the conjugates in the reverse order. That is, if p and q are quaternions, then (pq) ∗ = q ∗ p ∗, not p ∗ q ∗. The conjugation of a quaternion, in stark contrast to the complex setting, can be expressed with multiplication and addition of quaternions:
The number of Euler angles needed to represent the group SO(n) is n(n − 1)/2, equal to the number of planes containing two distinct coordinate axes in n-dimensional Euclidean space. In SO(4) a rotation matrix is defined by two unit quaternions, and therefore has six degrees of freedom, three from each quaternion.
Now every quaternion component appears multiplied by two in a term of degree two, and if all such terms are zero what is left is an identity matrix. This leads to an efficient, robust conversion from any quaternion – whether unit or non-unit – to a 3 × 3 rotation matrix.
A direct formula for the conversion from a quaternion to Euler angles in any of the 12 possible sequences exists. [2] For the rest of this section, the formula for the sequence Body 3-2-1 will be shown. If the quaternion is properly normalized, the Euler angles can be obtained from the quaternions via the relations:
This form may be more useful when two vectors defining a plane are involved. An example in physics is the Thomas precession which includes the rotation given by Rodrigues' formula, in terms of two non-collinear boost velocities, and the axis of rotation is perpendicular to their plane.