quaternions 2-Double Cover

• so just to give you a little more concrete challenge.
• I want you to find for me which quaternion corresponds to a 270 degree turn around the z axis.
• okay ,so 3/4 of a turn around the z axis, let’s say in the counterclockwise direction as you face it from above.
• alright so the way you do this is first set the axis to be fully in the z direction. so the K value is 1 ,but the I and J values are 0 .
• and as we alter our angle here bringing it up to 45 degrees ,gives us a quarter turn. changing the angle up to 90 degrees gives us a half turn .so it’s when you change it all the way(一直) up to 135 degrees. that you we have 3/4 of a turn . so rotating the sphere 270 degrees involves changing this angle to be half that ,135.
• and if we change out of the angle axis representation we can see this ,simply as a quaternion with four components.
• and you’ll notice that it has equal parts real and K .but I want you to notice one more thing here.
• there’s two ways we could think about orienting the sphere like this. I just did we rotated it 3/4 of a turn counterclockwise ,right .
• but you could also just rotate it negative 90 degrees which involved changing that angle to negative 45 and when you do that and you look at what quaternions being represented 。
• again it’s equal parts real and K .but it’s actually the negative of what we had before before the real part was negative and the K part was positive but here the real part is positive in the K part is negative .
• so we have two separate quaternions corresponding to the same orientation in 3d space.
• the phrase you’ll sometimes hear referring to this phenomenon is that quaternions are a double cover for rotations in 3d space.
• which basically means any given orientation corresponds to two separate points on the opposite side of a hyper sphere in four dimensions that we cannot see
• and the reason this happens is because of the angle doubling phenomenon,right.
• I mean think about it . as we change this angle up to 180 degrees the orientation it corresponds to rotates 360 degrees. getting back to where it started,however, the quaternion it’s representing has rotated 180 degrees around the hyper sphere .in this case it went from being 1 to being negative 1.
• so go ahead and keep playing around a bit .if you’d like， to build that intuition for which quatrainions correspond to which rotations .and in the separate sections I’ll explain why this happens in the broader four-dimensional context of what quaternion multiplication does to a hypersphere