Real Time Skeletal Animation with Dual Quaternion

Though Combination of Quaternions and matrix has been a popular tool in skeletal animation for more than 20 years, classical quaternions are restricted to the representation of rotations. In skeletal animation and many other applications of 3D computer graphics, we actually deal with rigid transformation including both rotation and translation. Dual quaternions represent rigid transformations nearly in the same way as quaternions represent rotations. In fact, Algorithms based on dual quaternions show better properties than those based on quaternions, including increased computational efficiency, reduced overhead and coordinate invariance. In this paper we show how to generalize established techniques for quaternions to dual quaternions to include all rigid transformations, and implement real-time character animation with dual quaternions under the platform of OpenGL in order to demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of dual quaternions.