Quaternions and spatial rotation the rotation. As the rotation angles become larger, the slice moves in the negative "z" direction, and the circles become larger until the equator of the sphere is reached, which will correspond to a rotation angle of 180 degrees. Continuing southward, the radii of the circles now become smaller (corresponding to the absolute value of the angle of the rotation considered as a negative number). Finally, as the south pole is reached, the circles shrink once more to the identity rotation, which is also specified as the point at the south pole. Notice that a number of characteristics of such
Degrees of freedom (mechanics) rotation, which means that it has six degrees of freedom. The exact constraint mechanical design method manages the degrees of freedom to neither underconstrain nor overconstrain a device. The position of an "n"-dimensional rigid body is defined by the rigid transformation, ["T"] = ["A", "d"], where "d" is an "n"-dimensional translation and "A" is an "n" × "n" rotation matrix, which has "n" translational degrees of freedom and "n"("n" − 1)/2 rotational degrees of freedom. The number of rotational degrees of freedom comes from the dimension of the rotation group SO(n). A non-rigid or deformable body may be thought of