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I looked through a thousand web pages for a good quaternion camera tutorial, and I could not find one. There is a good example on gametutorials.com that uses quaternions, but it uses them to rotate general objects and makes things a little more difficult than they actually need to be to use quaternions to make a camera. Therefore, in this article I am going to present a simple quaternion-based camera that can be used to rotate the view of your camera using the mouse. So, what is a Quaternion? Quaternions aren't actually as scary as they sound. Everything I read regarding quaternions talked about imaginary numbers, hyper-complex numbers, spinors, and other scary sounding things. There was too much maths jargon for my liking. If you understand what a vector is, it isn't very hard to understand what a quaternion is. One way to represent a quaternion is Q = xi + yj + zk + w where i,j & k are coordinate basis vectors for three dimensions. I don't particularly like this representation for computer graphics, especially where cameras are concerned. I prefer thinking of a quaternion as an object that contains a vector and a scalar. We'll call the vector v and keep the scalar as w. Q = [ w, v ] where v = xi + yj + zk. For use in the sample code below, here's a quaternion data structure: struct quaternion { double x, y, z, w; }; This is a much easier representation to comprehend for me. Now for our purposes, quaternion addition, subtraction, etc., aren't needed. We only need to know how to normalize (scale to length=1), multiply and compute the conjugate of a quaternion in order to generate a rotation. These tasks are actually very simple and are described below. Quaternion Operations

Contents   Introduction   Quaternion Operations   The Quaternion Camera   Printable version   Discuss this article