Let's remove quaternions from every 3D engine (2018)
&gt; As a side note, Geometric Algebra contains more than just Rotors, and is a very useful tool to have in one&#x27;s toolbox.<p>I worked in a game engine where a pair of mathy programmers fell in love with Geometric Algebra, and use this same argument that quarternions ought to be replaced to overhaul all of the math code in the engine using Geometric Algebra. The character rigging system removed matrices and used GA instead.<p>This caused several large problems in the code base:<p>For one, it slowed the code down a little because the GPU interface is all matrices, so there were conversions to matrices all over the place, rigging in particular.<p>And only two guys in the studio knew Geometric Algebra, and they didn’t invest time in teaching it or helping people understand it, they just hoisted it on everyone. All the rest of the programmers knew matrix math but not Geometric Algebra, so they would end up avoiding touching any of the GA code, i.e., any code that dealt in transformations. The two guys ended up with a lot of support of their own creation, but they were short with their answers, in part because they got so many questions, so the problem never went away.<p>The third problem is this whole rewrite was unnecessary. Fixing gimbal lock with quaternions is a <i>tiny</i> corner of the game engine, whereas using GA throughout is a massive rewrite. Matrices work really well for 98% of the code, and it’s not really a huge problem to have one or two routines that convert to quaternions and back while they do a rotation. It is a problem when any transform at all involves bivectors and rotors and you have no idea what the hell those are nor do you have time in your schedule to take a math class at work.<p>Personally, I’m intrigued by GA and have wanted to learn it for a while, but having used it in production, I’m mildly against replacing quaternions with GA, and very wildly against replacing matrices with GA.