I know this question has been asked many many times, but with all the knowledge out there I still can't get it to work for myself in the specific setting I now find myself in: Processing for Android.
The coordinate systems involved are (1) the real-world coordinate system as per Android's view: y is tangential to the ground and pointing north, z goes up into the sky, and x goes to your right, if you're standing on the ground and looking north; and (2) the device coordinate system as per Processing's view: x points to the right of the screen, y down, and z comes out of the screen.
The goal is simply to draw a cube on the screen and have it rotate on device rotation such that it seems that it is stable in actual space. That is: I want a map between the two coordinate systems so that I can draw in terms of the real-world coordinates instead of the screen coordinates.
In the code I'm using the Ketai sensor library, and subscribe to the onRotationVectorEvent(float x, float y, float z) event. Also, I have a simple quaternion class lying around that I got from https://github.com/kynd/PQuaternion. So far I have the following code, in which I have two different ways of trying to map, that coincide, but nevertheless don't work as I want them to:
import ketai.sensors.*;
KetaiSensor sensor;
PVector rotationAngle = new PVector(0, 0, 0);
Quaternion rot = new Quaternion();
void setup() {
fullScreen(P3D);
sensor = new KetaiSensor(this);
sensor.start();
}
void draw() {
background(#333333);
translate(width/2, height/2);
lights();
// method 1: draw lines for real-world axes in terms of processing's coordinates
PVector rot_x_axis = rot.mult(new PVector(400, 0, 0));
PVector rot_y_axis = rot.mult(new PVector(0, 0, -400));
PVector rot_z_axis = rot.mult(new PVector(0, 400, 4));
stroke(#ffffff);
strokeWeight(8); line(0, 0, 0, rot_x_axis.x, rot_x_axis.y, rot_x_axis.z);
strokeWeight(5); line(0, 0, 0, rot_y_axis.x, rot_y_axis.y, rot_y_axis.z);
strokeWeight(2); line(0, 0, 0, rot_z_axis.x, rot_z_axis.y, rot_z_axis.z);
// method 2: first rotate appropriately
fill(#f4f7d2);
rotate(asin(rotationAngle.mag()) * 2, rotationAngle.x, rotationAngle.y, rotationAngle.z);
box(200, 200, 200);
}
void onRotationVectorEvent(float x, float y, float z) {
rotationAngle = new PVector(x, y, z);
// I believe these two do the same thing.
rot.set(x, y, z, cos(asin(rotationAngle.mag())));
//rot.setAngleAxis(asin(rotationAngle.mag())*2, rotationAngle);
}
The above works well enough that the real-world axis lines coincide with the cube drawn, and both rotate in an interesting way. But still, there seems to be some "gimbal stuff" going on, in the sense that, when I rotate my device up and down standing one way, the cube also rotates up and down, but standing another way, the cube rotates sideways --- as if I'm applying the rotations in the wrong order. However, I'm trying to avoid gimbal madness by working with quaternions this way --- how does it still apply?
