Early view of the "explorable videos"

Good to know. Admittedly, the target audience here might have been more in the direction of those who have heard of quaternions, but didn't know what they mean (e.g. programmers, animators, abstract algebra students). Some of the coming videos will (hopefully) be more familiar.

3blue1brown

I'm just going to give some unfiltered feedback that doesn't reflect particularly well on me: I haven't watched the explorable yet but I found the previous videos on quaternions really challenging and haven't yet made the effort to go back and rewatch and try to get a foothold. That's spoken as someone studying first/second year undergrad math a bit later in life. Hopefully I'll come to really appreciate the quaternions series! But just to give direct feedback about user response I will admit to my initial reactions being slight disappointment that you weren't covering more familiar undergrad territory such as real analysis, complex analysis, differential equations, group theory, linear algebra II, etc.

Dan Davison

This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen :D

Great fun! My only confusion was about which side of the sphere the dot for f(i) was on: near side or far side. And similarly for f(j) and f(k). If there was another way to clarify that it would help. Can seem like an odd optical illusion instead, or at some angles like the dot suddenly moves from rotation around one axis to another axis.

Neal McBurnett

This is really great! The "video" parts of it make the applet come together in a way it didn't before. I just noticed a couple small things. For one, when you close out of an applet, you are taken back to the article but lose your place on the page. Second (and this is mostly preference) I find it a little odd that you sometimes ask me to pause and play with it, but some animation keeps playing (usually interpolating from one viewpoint to another). I think it might be a little clearer if the animation stopped completely for a few seconds to signal that you are done controlling it, and it's the user's turn to give it a try. Okay, there might be one more thing - where's the music? :)

Ben Visness

At the moment, I have a number of other things on the queue. I'm honestly not as interested by Octonions as I am by other things.

3blue1brown

Awesome suggestion! If I still have some time today while we get things finalized for the public release, I'll try to throw in some suggested exercises.

3blue1brown

YES YES YES!!!! Ben Eater and 3b1b!!! I love Bens 8bit CPU project and love your content. The hype is real!!!

Giovanni Viscardi

I was skeptical at first of the concept, but the format quickly overcame my skepticism. Any feeling of overwhelmed-ness soon evaporated thanks to your suggestions of which knobs to experiment with. I don't get a lot out of unguided or unstructured experimentation. I need structure, whether self-imposed or imposed by a guide. But this video provided that nicely. I was especially pleased with the way the video smoothly homotopes the sphere back to your narrative when I press the play button. That's a nice touch. It feels very polite. This seems to have been a really difficult endeavor, so I hope you found it worthwhile. One minor suggestion (and it wouldn't lead to hours more work): I'm the type of learner who would prefer that you gave some exercises for me to work through on my own, rather than simply telling me "ask and answer some of your own questions." I appreciate your respect for your audience's own curiosity, but I don't see any harm in suggesting some exercises at the end.

Jacob Mirra

Is there a chance you'll ever cover Octonions? Cohl Furey's youtube videos seem cool, but are completely indecipherable to me.

Goddess Of All That She Encounters (G.O.A.T.S.E.)

Not that I know enough about quaternions to detect anything that could be wrong but sometimes I find the jumps in the values (of angles etc) when scrolling the mouse are too great, I would like finer control like when dragging.

Gregor Shapiro

Ingenious toy. Never seen this format before.

Benjamin BairMoshe

Ah, good to know. We'll look into it!

3blue1brown

Best thing I've seen all day

3blue1brown

This is really great! A small feature request for when click+dragging one of the quaternion component values: when you drag a value to +1 or -1, the system loses its knowledge of the other components since they all drop to zero. It would be better if it remembered the other components' prior values, so that dragging to +1/-1 and then back to a smaller value is a *reversible* operation. As it is, it can be confusing to be dragging a single value back+forth and yet not end up back where you started.

Iestyn bleasdale-shepherd

I made a short video demonstrating a huge problem with this format: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=558WrJqHjUQ" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=558WrJqHjUQ</a>

Brikir

PPS: I just went back to the recent Beta quaternion video and it works fine on my S9. So something about new videos is incompatible with my Samsung S9 ...?

Chris Jennings

Trying to view this on my samsung s9 using firefox, the video opens showing everything *except* the 3d surfaces and circles, so unusable. Is this unique to me... ? (PS: It works fine on my computer)

Chris Jennings

That sin / cos representation made it all click for me, I think. I'm so glad I paused it before you gave the answer so I could figure it out in my head

This is soooooo coool

This is fantastic! I am not yet done with these and sadly have to stop playing now, but I can't resist to just comment here about how cool I think this is for teaching and how many possibilities this opens... I always held that playing around with variables is a great way of building intuition and that your animations are among the best visualisations of maths out there. Don't be surprised if this ends up in a lot of classrooms, I will definitely be linking this to a student or two once it's fully public

ChalkyChalkson

This looks amazing! I haven't seen an explorable thing which does interaction-while-there-is-explanation so well. Very nice use of WebGL.

DomNomNom