quaternions 5-Stereographic projection, 4d

• so in this section of the applet. the entirety of three-dimensional space that you see, and the various objects that you might see, within it are a projection from a hypersphere in four dimensions that we can’t see.
• so， whereas in two dimensions we had the crutch of actually knowing what two-dimensional space was, then on the right here, there’s the image just of the projection. and in three dimensions we had the crutch of understanding a three-dimensional sphere and then in the upper right here, there was the view just of the projection.
• we don’t have such a crutch for a hyper sphere since that’s beyond our perception or beyond my perception at least I can’t speak for you.
• now the controls in the upper left here are set up specifically to be able to play with quaternion multiplication, which we’ll get to in just a moment,
• but right now all we care about our individual points, nevertheless it might be a little helpful if I talk through(说透) what we have up here .
• so there’s one quaternion q1 which is a point in four-dimensional space ,and similar to what you saw before .if you try to change its coordinates it’s always constrained to have a unit length meaning the sum of the squares of these numbers is 1 .
• and then we have some other point P or you can select various options, for which point you want to see or maybe collections of points like a whole circle along the hyper sphere or a whole sphere of points on that hyper sphere .
• and the letter P is just meant to denote one of those points and then Q to some other quaternion and what you’re looking at is the output of the product q1 times P times q2 .
• and again later on we’ll talk through what quaternion multiplication does and how to think about it .
• and you’ll see why setting things up this way with q1 and q2 sandwiching the point P is useful for understanding how quaternions relate to 3d rotation .
• but right now the only thing we need to do is focus on a single point, a single quaternion to get a sense for what the stereographic projection is doing.
• so q1 will be that quaternion that we want to look at ,and the only point that I’m going to show for P in the middle here is 1 .
• and then q2 we’re going to leave that fixed at 1, so when you look at the output of this function q1 times P times q2. its q1 some four-dimensional point times 1 times 1.so it stays the same …
• take a moment to do this change the various four coordinates ,the real part the I part the J part and the K part ,and see what that does to our point and where it ends up in 3-dimensional space.
• what you might notice in doing this is that the I J and K part seems to control the direction for where this point is away from the origin .
• and then the real part controls how far away it is when that real part is close to one you’re really close to the origin and when that real part is close to negative one you’re close to the point at infinity which is to say you’re far away from the origin.
• and this should feel very analogous to what was happening in three dimensions. where maybe we view this sphere from head-on. to notice how the imaginary parts give us a direction away from the origin and then the real part tells us if we’re close to the North Pole of that sphere which gets projected into the center or for close to the South Pole which gets projected to the point at infinity .
• and as you change this value q1 see if you can kind of predict a little bit, how that change is going to influence where the point f1 is.