When do I need to use quaternions?

Question

I have been carrying out 2D and 3D operations, including graphics, for many years and have never used quaternions so I don\'t have a feel for them. I know that they can be used

Answer 1

They have a smaller memory footprint than rotation matrices and they are more efficient than both matrix and angle/axis representations.

Also:

• It's extremely easy to interpolate between two quaternions, which is useful for smooth camera movements etc.
• Unit normalisation of floating point quaternions suffers from fewer rounding defects than matrix representations.