(I know there's weird historical oddities like branching laser disks but they are unusual enough to warrant a category all of their own)
Maybe I'm pedantic on this because I work with VR a lot where the terminology is a mess. (Are 360 videos "VR"? Then what do we call actual VR videos? etc etc.)
My shortcut has been to think of them as a rotation around an axis. Once I thought of them that way, I was able to use them for all kinds of purposes and situations despite not having a deeper mathematical understanding.
eventually after looking at the math and understanding more about complex numbers, i got some intuition for the multiplication of the basis vectors and i feel like I can sort of extend the intuition by linear decomposition (distributivity)
multplication by a complex basis vector is like a pair of rotations one of the rotations is in plane spanned by the reals and vector itself and the other is a rotation "orthogonal" to the vector spanned by the 2 other basis vectors.
This helped me recover the intuition around scaling and rotating from the complex numbers to quats.
Visualizing quaternions: An explorable video series - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18310788 - Oct 2018 (32 comments)
