The geometry package provides classes useful for many physical simulations in the real 3D space, namely vectors and rotations.

org.apache.commons.math.geometry.Vector3D provides a simple vector type. One important feature is that instances of this class are guaranteed to be immutable, this greatly simplifies modelling dynamical systems with changing states: once a vector has been computed, a reference to it is known to preserve its state as long as the reference itself is preserved.

Numerous constructors are available to create vectors. In addition to the straightforward cartesian coordinates constructor, a constructor using azimuthal coodinates can build normalized vectors and linear constructors from one, two, three or four base vectors are also available. Constants have been defined for the most commons vectors (plus and minus canonical axes and null vector).

The generic vectorial space operations are available including dot product, normalization, orthogonal vector finding and angular separation computation which have a specific meaning in 3D. The 3D geometry specific cross product is of course also implemented.

org.apache.commons.math.geometry.Rotation represents 3D rotations. Rotation instances are also immutable objects, as Vector3D instances.

Rotations can be represented by several different mathematical entities (matrices, axe and angle, Cardan or Euler angles, quaternions). This class presents a higher level abstraction, more user-oriented and hiding implementation details. Well, for the curious, we use quaternions for the internal representation. The user can build a rotation from any of these representations, and any of these representations can be retrieved from a Rotation instance (see the various constructors and getters). In addition, a rotation can also be built implicitely from a set of vectors and their image.

This implies that this class can be used to convert from one representation to another one. For example, converting a rotation matrix into a set of Cardan angles can be done using the following single line of code:

Focus is oriented on what a rotation does rather than on its underlying representation. Once it has been built, and regardless of its internal representation, a rotation is an operator which basically transforms three dimensional vectors into other three dimensional vectors. Depending on the application, the meaning of these vectors may vary as well as the semantics of the rotation.

For example in an spacecraft attitude simulation tool, users will often consider the vectors are fixed (say the Earth direction for example) and the rotation transforms the coordinates coordinates of this vector in inertial frame into the coordinates of the same vector in satellite frame. In this case, the rotation implicitly defines the relation between the two frames (we have fixed vectors and moving frame). Another example could be a telescope control application, where the rotation would transform the sighting direction at rest into the desired observing direction when the telescope is pointed towards an object of interest. In this case the rotation transforms the direction at rest in a topocentric frame into the sighting direction in the same topocentric frame (we have moving vectors in fixed frame). In many case, both approaches will be combined, in our telescope example, we will probably also need to transform the observing direction in the topocentric frame into the observing direction in inertial frame taking into account the observatory location and the Earth rotation.

These examples show that a rotation means what the user wants it to mean, so this class does not push the user towards one specific definition and hence does not provide methods like projectVectorIntoDestinationFrame or computeTransformedDirection. It provides simpler and more generic methods: applyTo(Vector3D) and applyInverseTo(Vector3D).

Since a rotation is basically a vectorial operator, several rotations can be composed together and the composite operation r = r1 o r2 (which means that for each vector u, r(u) = r1(r2(u))) is also a rotation. Hence we can consider that in addition to vectors, a rotation can be applied to other rotations as well (or to itself). With our previous notations, we would say we can apply r1 to r2 and the result we get is r = r1 o r2. For this purpose, the class provides the methods: applyTo(Rotation) and applyInverseTo(Rotation).