4 ms·
> The only real downside of them is that they seem to drive everybody to this obsession to try to truly understand them. This. If you only want to understand *
by ubj 2y ago
> The only real downside of them is that they seem to drive everybody to this obsession to try to truly understand them.
This. If you only want to understand *how to apply* quaternions to represent rotations, it's not too hard to learn. However, if you want to understand *why* they work, that's a totally different story.
Many of my colleagues still use Euler angles to represent rotations. I always use quaternions, and am a bit baffled why people are so averse to them.
- noone_important 2y agoIf you have some knowledge of group theory the 'why' is pretty straight forward. Quaternions are the generators of SU(2) which is a double covering of SO(3). The latter describes rotations in 3 dimensions. Thus you can express any rotation in 3d with quaternions.