Unbiased rotational moves for rigid-body dynamics
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Updated: Aug 30, 2026

Controlled Rotation of Human Observers in a Virtual Reality Environment
Published on: April 21, 2022
Daniel A Beard1, Tamar Schlick
1Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA.
Abstract:
We introduce an unbiased protocol for performing rotational moves in rigid-body dynamics simulations. This approach-based on the analytic solution for the rotational equations of motion for an orthogonal coordinate system at constant angular velocity-removes deficiencies that have been largely ignored in Brownian dynamics simulations, namely errors for finite rotations that result from applying the noncommuting rotational matrices in an arbitrary order. Our algorithm should thus replace standard approaches to rotate local coordinate frames in Langevin and Brownian dynamics simulations.
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