GPU Pro 5

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Quaternions Revisited

Peter Sikachev, Vladimir Egorov,

and Sergey Makeev

1.1 Introduction

Quaternions have been extensively used in computer graphics in the last few

years. One defines a quaternion as a hypercomplex number, w + xi + yj + kz,

but in practice it is convenient to consider it to be a 4D vector (x, y, z, w) with

a special operation of multiplication defined for it. In 3D computer graphics,

quaternions can be used to encode rotations and coordinate systems.

In this chapter we describe the experience of using quaternions in the MMO-

RPG engine. In comparison with [Malyshau 12], we propose a quaternion in-

terpolation solution that does not