Charts on SO(3) closed set under composition. This visualization can be extended to a general rotation in 3-dimensional space. The identity rotation is a point, and a small angle of rotation about some axis can be represented as a point on a sphere with a small radius. As the angle of rotation grows, the sphere grows, until the angle of rotation reaches 180 degrees, at which point the sphere begins to shrink, becoming a point as the angle approaches 360 degrees (or zero degrees from the negative direction). This set of expanding and contracting spheres represents a hypersphere in four-dimensional space (a 3-sphere).
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