Rigid Transformation

[purepani]

Scipy recently added a RigidTransformation class, which represents rotations and translations. This might be good to support as part of the magpylib api.

[OrtnerMichael]

Hmm ... can you give a practical example how you would use this ?

like

object.get_rigit_transform()

to return the state of an object ?

and

object.apply_rigid_transform(RT)

to apply a translation + rotation ?

one could replace the internal position and orientation attributes by an RT-matrix. But in the end a user would still want to have object.position and object.rotate() ... and so on.

I think its not a bad idea to generalize this - ofc. we don't want to loose commands object.position = (1,2,3) ... so one would probably need two dependent attributes here ... like we already have it with magnetization and polarization

I like the idea.

[purepani]

Yeah, I was thinking that it makes sense to store this object and then keep all the existing ways to read/write rotation values to that object, but also allow for the user to directly give a RigidTransformation object.

The examples you gave were basically spot on for what I was thinking. Additionally, being able to instantiate an object with an RT object instead of a translation and rotation

magpy.Cube(
    ..., 
    rigid_transformation=RT
)

[OrtnerMichael]

yeah this is cool :) ... it works very similar to the Rotation package ... it does not break any syntax and generalizes the implementation - but it will force everyone to work with Scipy 1.16 ...

Also ... it will probably be a while bofre they implement the general array API ?

[purepani]

I think they are doing this concurrently with the Rotation class. I would guess that they would both support the array api by the next version of scipy.
(supported meaning supported in the experimental flag for the array api)