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Next: Interpolating Unit Quaternions Up: Orientation and Quaternions Previous: Rotations and Quaternions

Advantages of Quaternions

Doing rotation this way is fairly perverse, except for three points:

  1. For many applications, the independent definition of an axis of rotation and an angle makes sense.
  2. The definition of an orientation by a quaternion is coordinate system independent and isotropic.
  3. Spherical interpolation of quaternions gives better results than interpolation of Euler angles.


CS488/688: Introduction to Interactive Computer Graphics
University of Waterloo
Computer Graphics Lab

cs488@cgl.uwaterloo.ca