page_title: Quaternions and spatial rotation
section_title: Visualizing the space of rotations
hierarchical_section_title: Quaternions and spatial rotation / Quaternion rotation operations / The hypersphere of rotations / Visualizing the space of rotations
context_page_description: Unit quaternions, also known as versors, provide a convenient mathematical notation for representing orientations and rotations of objects in three dimensions. Compared to Euler angles they are simpler to compose and avoid the problem of gimbal lock. Compared to rotation matrices they are more compact, more numerically stable, and more efficient. Quaternions have applications in computer graphics, computer vision, robotics, navigation, molecular dynamics, flight dynamics, orbital mechanics of satellites and crystallographic texture analysis.
  When used to represent rotation, unit quaternions are also called rotation quaternions as they represent the 3D rotation group. When used to represent an orientation, they are called orientation quaternions or attitude quaternions. The equation for spatial rotations can be summarized for radians about a unit axis as the Quaternion where and.
context_section_description: Unit quaternions represent the group of Euclidean rotations in three dimensions in a very straightforward way. The correspondence between rotations and quaternions can be understood by first visualizing the space of rotations itself.
  In order to visualize the space of rotations, it helps to consider a simpler case. Any rotation in three dimensions can be described by a rotation by some angle about some axis; for our purposes, we will use an axis vector to establish handedness for our angle. Consider the special case in which the axis of rotation lies in the xy plane. We can then specify the axis of one of these rotations by a point on a circle through which the vector crosses, and we can select the radius of the circle to denote the angle of rotation.
  Similarly, a rotation whose axis of rotation lies in the xy plane can be described as a point on a sphere of fixed radius in three dimensions. Beginning at the north pole of a sphere in three-dimensional space, we specify the point at the north pole to be the identity rotation (a zero angle rotation). Just as in the case of the identity rotation, no axis of rotation is defined, and the angle of rotation (zero) is irrelevant. A rotation having a very small rotation angle can be specified by a slice through the sphere parallel to the xy plane and very near the north pole. The circle defined by this slice will be very small, corresponding to the small angle of the rotation. As the rotation angles become larger, the slice moves in the negative z direction, and the circles become larger until the equator of the sphere is reached, which will correspond to a rotation angle of 180 degrees. Continuing southward, the radii of the circles now become smaller (corresponding to the absolute value of the angle of the rotation considered as a negative number). Finally, as the south pole is reached, the circles shrink once more to the identity rotation, which is also specified as the point at the south pole.
  Notice that a number of characteristics of such rotations and their representations can be seen by this visualization. The space of rotations is continuous, each rotation has a neighborhood of rotations which are nearly the same, and this neighborhood becomes flat as the neighborhood shrinks. Also, each rotation is actually represented by two antipodal points on the sphere, which are at opposite ends of a line through the center of the sphere. This reflects the fact that each rotation can be represented as a rotation about some axis, or, equivalently, as a negative rotation about an axis pointing in the opposite direction (a so-called double cover). The "latitude" of a circle representing a particular rotation angle will be half of the angle represented by that rotation, since as the point is moved from the north to south pole, the latitude ranges from zero to 180 degrees, while the angle of rotation ranges from 0 to 360 degrees. (the "longitude" of a point then represents a particular axis of rotation.) Note however that this set of rotations is not closed under composition. Two successive rotations with axes in the xy plane will not necessarily give a rotation whose axis lies in the xy plane, and thus cannot be represented as a point on the sphere. This will not be the case with a general rotation in 3-space, in which rotations do form a closed set under composition.
  This visualization can be extended to a general rotation in 3-dimensional space. The identity rotation is a point, and a small angle of rotation about some axis can be represented as a point on a sphere with a small radius. As the angle of rotation grows, the sphere grows, until the angle of rotation reaches 180 degrees, at which point the sphere begins to shrink, becoming a point as the angle approaches 360 degrees (or zero degrees from the negative direction). This set of expanding and contracting spheres represents a hypersphere in four dimensional space (a 3-sphere). Just as in the simpler example above, each rotation represented as a point on the hypersphere is matched by its antipodal point on that hypersphere. The 
caption: Two rotations by different angles and different axes in the space of rotations. The length of the vector is related to the magnitude of the rotation.
exif: {}