Understanding Quaternion Rotations

An object in 3-space can go from any initial orientation to any final orientation by:

• defining exactly one vector in 3-space
• rotating that object about that vector by a specific angle

The anatomy of a quaternion

A quaternion is defined:

\[\widehat{q} = a + b\hat{i} + c\hat{j} + d\hat{k}\]

Where \(\hat{i}\), \(\hat{j}\) and \(\hat{k}\) are all unit vectors along the three spatial axes.

Significance of the 3-Space Component

To understand quaternion rotation intuitively, let’s ignore the “real” part and only pay attention to the 3-space component:

\[\widehat{q}_{ijk} = b\hat{i} + c\hat{j} + d\hat{k}\]

The magnitude \(\Vert \widehat{q}_{ijk} \Vert\) defines a fraction from \(0.0\) to \(1.0\) which represents a \(0.0^{\circ}\) to \(180.0^{\circ}\) rotation about the vector \(\widehat{q}_{ijk}\).

Note: The relationship between \(\Vert \widehat{q}_{ijk} \Vert\) is not linear. \(\Vert \widehat{q} \Vert = 1.0\) therefore, a rotation of \(90.0^{\circ}\) maps to \(\Vert \widehat{q}_{ijk} \Vert = 0.7071, a = 0.7071\).

What about a?

The mathematics of quaternions are a little bit more involved than what I described above.

Thier inventer, William Hamilton desctibes them as quotents of two vectors, which requires \(\Vert \widehat{q} \Vert = 1.0\). Therefore, \(a\) effectively describes how much a vector should not rotate in order to point in the direction of another vector.

A value of \(a = 1.0\) indicates the two vectors making up the quaternion pointed in the same direction.

Calculating a quaternion from a vector and rotation

Given a unit vector:

\[\widehat{n} = \begin{bmatrix} x \\ y \\ z \end{bmatrix}\]

And an angle which we will rotate around the unit vector by, \(\phi\).

\[\widehat{q} = \cos\left(\frac{\theta}{2}\right) + \sin\left(\frac{\theta}{2}\right) (x\hat{i} + y\hat{j} + z\hat{k})\]