Gimbal lock is annoying, but that 'or whatever' bit I mentioned in the last paragraph is actually another flaw. That's basically when two of your axis line up and you lose a degree of freedom. Those are nice and intuitive, but they have a few flaws. Pitch X degrees, roll Y degrees, then yaw Z (or whatever). A rotational path, or journey, if you will. Those can be thought of as a sequence of steps. Now, you're probably used to dealing with rotations in Euler angles (roll, pitch and yaw). Just don't forget you can pull the ripcord any time and skip to the next section if you want. That's not going to be enough for everyone, of course. Don't try and unpack the secret sauce, just enjoy the burger. We're computer scientists and the entire field is built on layers upon layers of abstraction.īoth the Myo SDK and Unity come with the functions you need, and most other platforms will as well. Do you hand craft each IP packet in binary before you send it out through the network? No. Treat them as a magic blob and use a library to handle everything. You can stop right there and skip to the next section if you want. Either from some 'forward' origin direction (in which case, it's an orientation) or the direction and magnitude to rotate another orientation (ie, you could have a quaternion that represents rotating 90 degrees clockwise about the Y axis), in which case, it's a rotation.Īnd that's it. It represents the shortest path to get from one orientation to another. You can think of one as simply a rotation delta.

Here's the thing though: It turns out, quaternions really aren't that scary. In fact any time you have an orientation or rotation, you are very likely to run into a quaternion. The Myo armband gives you a quaternion whenever you ask for its orientation as well. You'll find them representing the orientation of every object in Unity. For a while it seemed like everywhere I looked there was a quaternion staring back at me. I'm Paul Bernhardt, and I'm here to help. You’re left frustrated, with a broken mess that doesn't make any sense. You panic, you start fiddling around, but everything falls apart. You want to be cool and use it, but you don't really know what you're doing. You dive in, you're having a good time, things are going great, when all of a sudden, BAM, it whips out a quaternion. So you meet this cool API online somewhere.

Rotating gravity source engine sdk