rotationdefine

Rotationdefine is a concept in computer graphics and computational geometry that refers to a data structure or API construct for representing and manipulating rotations in three-dimensional space. It provides a unified interface for orientation, abstracting away the underlying representation and enabling conversions between common rotation forms such as matrices, quaternions, Euler angles, and axis-angle.

In practice, a rotationdefine object stores a rotation in one or more representations, and offers operations to apply the rotation to vectors or points, compose rotations, invert them, and interpolate between rotations. Typical methods include fromEuler, fromQuaternion, toMatrix, applyTo, compose, inverse, and slerp. Normalization and numerical stability are important considerations, especially for quaternion-based representations, which require unit quaternions.

Common use cases include 3D rendering pipelines, robotics kinematics, simulation, and augmented or virtual reality. By providing an abstraction over different representations, rotationdefine enables flexible software design and compatibility across systems that may prefer different rotation formats. However, choosing a representation affects performance and precision; Euler angles can cause gimbal lock, while quaternions avoid this at the cost of more complex math.

See also: quaternion, rotation matrix, axis-angle, Euler angles, SLERP, orientation representation.