Rigid-Body Transformations

• Rigid-body, or Euclidean transformations

• Preserve the shape of the objects that they act on

• Includes rotations and translations (just as in two dimensions)

First we begin with a representation for 3-D points. We will consider points as column vectors. Thus, a typical point with coordinates (x, y, z) is represented as:

or... as ...

This is not the only possible representation. You may encounter textbooks that consider points as row vectors. What is most important is that you use a consistent representation.

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