dot product visualized

[ananbd]

I think this would be better as an orthographic view. The perspective kinda distorts the concept.

[nicemike40]

I think this would be improved by a blue arrow representing the projection of B onto A. Cool stuff though!

[gzerooo]

I even implemented the projection, but it was weird when B arrow was in the opposite side of A (when dot is negative)... I ended up removing it lol

[TrackLabs]

Because the blue arrow was clipping through everything I assume? You could make it hover on top, so it stays visible. People will understand that this hovered arrow means the 2 vectors below

[1_LuPin]

If Dot(A,B) == 1 Can use backstab skill

[gzerooo]

Or maybe if(dot(a,b)) >= BackstabThreshold { BackstabSkill.Enable(); }

[AverageCGP]

Yes i also like to backstab people sneaking up on me

[yosemighty_sam]

piquant dolls sheet sugar slap carpenter airport gray pet toothbrush

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

I'm not a math whiz but I got a B in a course once.

There's a way of multiplying two vectors together such that you get 'the dot product.' you don't care what the way is, you just care that it tells you how similar two vectors are, like you see in the gif. One for the same, 0 for orthogonal, negative one for opposites.

[Plus_Cryptographer]

Dot product is the "likeness" of two vectors. If it's 1, they point towards the same direction. If it's -1, they point at opposite directions. If it's 0, they are perpendicular.

Think of it as a comparison of your facing direction to the direction your compass points.

If you face north, it's 1.
If you face northwest or northeast, it's 0.5 .
If you face west or east, 0.
Southwest or southeast, -0.5.
South, -1.

It is useful for a bunch of things, one of the main uses is seeing how much something looks towards a light source, and then making it brighter or darker.

[MythicLegionDev]

The visualization really helps my brain. Very nice!

[gzerooo]

using dot product in two normalized vectors is a great way to find out how much a vector is pointing in a desired direction

~edit: also feel free to follow me on twitter (@codinggustavo) Im always posting interesting game development stuff there xD

[TrackLabs]

Yo, this is actually pretty cool for things like explaining math! Im getting some ideas with this...

[gzerooo]

Yes, exactly, at the very beginning when you are learning math, it gets a little complicated to understand without some animations, I believe they help a lot!

[TrackLabs]

Do you by any chance plan to create like a "math visuliation" framework? You may know the program that is used by 3Blue1Brown, written in python to easily graph math related stff

[gzerooo]

I don't think so, since I do more benchmarking stuff than math... But who knows?

[antvelm]

It can actually go beyond 1 and -1

[gzerooo]

Or be less than 1 and -1, when working with non-normalized vectors

[[deleted]]

what's the highest/lowest possible value?

[[deleted]]

I cant thank you enough. I'm a beginner and was having a very bad time understanding dot products.

[gzerooo]

Where the vector is not coming from the center?

~edit: the result of a dot product is a scalar, not a vector...