VEX101 - Why Quaternions? (Patreon)

Quaternions - Why would you use them? How do they work?

To get this out of my head: The question "What are quaternions exactly?!" comes up somewhat frequently. Without going into the math too deeply, you can think of them as this: A really clever and elaborate way of encoding an axis/angle rotation into four numbers.

The angle will be encoded into a real number (remember those on the standard number line?), while the axis will be encoded using three imaginary numers (those that expand the number line into a second dimension. You can think of them of a quirky way of building vectors. See: https://xkcd.com/2028/).

Why all this effort? Well quaternions do have some advantages. Which we'll go over in this tut.