February 2006
Intermediate to advanced
600 pages
8h 57m
English
One might hope that because the quaternion representation of a 3D orientation frame or rotation matrix requires only four floating-point numbers for its computer representation, and the standard 3 × 3 matrix requires nine floating-point numbers, that the computational complexity of standard computer graphics operations involving rotations would favor quaternions. In fact, one can find many places in which it is claimed that all rotations should be converted to quaternions at the outset and that thereafter one should use only the quaternion libraries for implementing standard operations. The procedures that need to be examined to confirm or deny such efficiency claims include the following.
Matrix to ...