Develop Reference

X Y distance from longitude and latitude

I have two set's of longitude and latitude, i am desperately trying to figure out how many meters point A is displaced from point B, horizontally and vertically.
My goal would be have to +/-X and +/-Y values - I already have the shortest distance between the two points via Location.distanceBetween()....i thought i could use this with the Location.bearingTo() to find the values im looking for via basic trigonometry.
My thinking was i could use the bearing as angle A, 90 degrees as angle C and legnth of Side C (distanceBetween) to calculate the legnth of side A (x axis) and B (y axis) but the results were underwhelming to say the least lol
//CALCULATE ANGLES
double ANGLE_A;
ANGLE_A = current_Bearing; //Location.bearingTo()
ANGLE_A = ANGLE_A*Math.PI/180; //CONVERT DEGREES TO RADIANS
double ANGLE_C;
ANGLE_C = 90; // Always Right Angle
ANGLE_C = ANGLE_C*Math.PI/180; //CONVERT DEGREES TO RADIANS
double ANGLE_B;
ANGLE_B = 180 - ANGLE_A - ANGLE_C; // 3 sides of triangle must add up to 180, if 2 sides known 3rd can be calced
ANGLE_B = ANGLE_B*Math.PI/180; //CONVERT DEGREES TO RADIANS
//CALCULATE DISTANCES
double SIDE_C = calculatedDistance; //Location.distanceTo()
double SIDE_A = Math.sin(ANGLE_A) * SIDE_C /Math.sin(ANGLE_C);
double SIDE_B = Math.sin(ANGLE_B)*SIDE_C/Math.sin(ANGLE_C);
What im noticing is that my bearing changes very little between the two points regardless of how we move, though mind you im testing this at 10 - 100m distance, its always at 64.xxxxxxx and only the last few decimals really change.
All the online references i can find always look at computing the shortest path, and although this awesome site references x and y positions it always ends up combining them into shortest distance again
Would SUPER appreciate any pointers in the right direction!

Since the earth is not flat, your idea with 90 degree angles will not work properly.
What might be better, is this.
Lets say your 2 known points A and B have latitude and longitude latA, longA and latB, longB.
Now you could introduce two additional points C and D with latC = latA, longC = longB, and latD = latB, longD = longA, so the points A, B, C, D form a rectangle on the earth's surface.
Now you can simply use distanceBetween(A, C) and distanceBerween(A, D) to get the required distances.

It may be possible to utilize Location.distanceBetween(), if following conditions meet,
the points are located far apart from polar regions and
distance is short enough (compared to radius of the Earth).
The way is very simple. Just fix either longitude or latitude and vary only the other. Then calculate distance.
Location location1 = new Location("");
Location location2 = new Location("");
location1.setLatitude(37.4184359437);
location1.setLongitude(-122.088038921);
location2.setLatitude(37.3800232707);
location2.setLongitude(-122.073230422);
float[] distance = new float[3];
Location.distanceBetween(
location1.getLatitude(), location1.getLongitude(),
location2.getLatitude(), location2.getLongitude(),
distance
);
double lat_mid = (location1.getLatitude() + location2.getLatitude()) * 0.5;
double long_mid = (location1.getLongitude() + location2.getLongitude()) * 0.5;
float[] distanceLat = new float[3];
Location.distanceBetween(
location1.getLatitude(), long_mid,
location2.getLatitude(), long_mid,
distanceLat
);
float[] distanceLong = new float[3];
Location.distanceBetween(
lat_mid, location1.getLongitude(),
lat_mid, location2.getLongitude(),
distanceLong
);
double distance_approx = Math.sqrt(
Math.pow(distanceLong[0], 2.0) + Math.pow(distanceLat[0], 2.0)
);
Compare distance[0] and distance_approx, check whether accuracy meets your requiement.

If your points are close enough, you may easily calculate x-y distances from latitude / longitude once you know that 1 degree of latitude is 111km, and one degree of longitude is 111km * cos(latitude):
y_dist = abs(a.lat - b.lat) * 111000;
x_dist = abs(a.lon - b.lon) * 111000 * cos(a.lat);
For short distances we could easily ignore that earth is not exactly a sphere, the error is approximately 0.1-0.2% depending on your exact location.

There is no valid answer to this question until you define what projection.
The azimuth of a "straight" line varies along the route unless you are travelling exactly due south or due north. You can only calculate the angles at each node, or azimuth at a specific point along the route. Angles at the nodes will not add up to 180° because you're referring to an ellipsoidal triangle, and calculating an ellipsoidal triangle is a multiple-step process that in all honesty, is better left to the libraries out there such as OSGEO.
If you want to fit the geometry to a plane Cartesian, it is usually using the Lambert projection for areas mostly long on east and west directions, and Transverse Mercator on longer north to south projections. The entire Earth is mapped in the UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator) that will give you Cartesian coordinates anywhere, but in no case will you get perfect Eucldian geometry when dealing with geodetics. For instance, if you go south 10 miles, turn left 90° and go east for 10 miles, turn left 90° again, you can be anywhere from 10 miles from your starting point, to exactly back to where you started, if that point happened to be the North pole. So you may have a mathematically beautiful bearing on the UTM coordinate plane, but on the ground, you cannot turn the same angles as the UTM geometry indicates and follow that same path on ground. You will either follow a straight line on the ground and a curved line on a cartesian plane, or vice-versa.
You could do a distance between two points on the same northings and separately, the same eastings, and derive a north distance and an east distance. However, in reality the angles of this triangle will make sense only on paper, and not on the globe. If a plane took off at the bearing calculated by such a triangle, it would arrive in the wrong continent.

Search for a location inside of a area radius

I am building a minecraft plugin.
Basically my world limit is set by radius off the spawn location, instead of having 4 corners to determine the limited region of the world.
So my world limit is a round radius for example of distance of 1000 blocks.
Now I want to place a small 50x50 round area of blocks inside of that area of 1000 blocks radius, so I need to find a random coordinate which will be the center point of the round area I am going to make.
Question
How to get a random coordinate in a radius based area, is there an equation for that? I can't just do spawnX + rand(-1000,1000) and for spawnZ, because the area is round.
How can I make sure that the whole round area I want to put in will fit in the big radius area?

To pick a random spot in a circle would be a random angle and a random number within the radius:
random_angle = random(2π)
random_dist = random(radius)
random_x = cos(random_angle) * random_dist
random_y = sin(random_angle) * random_dist
To ensure a round area fits into another round area you calculate the distance from the middle for the small round + its radius and as long as that's equal to or less than the bigger round then it fits in.
To find the distance is a² + b² = c². So subsitute that for x and y to get:
distance = √(x_diff² + y_diff²)
This all assumes your co-ords start at (0, 0) in the middle of the map circle. If not you can calculate that by adding half the width and height to all co-ords.

If you want each point of your circle to have an equal chance of being selected, you can generate a set of polar coordinates instead, then convert it to cartesian coordinates.
Generate these random numbers:
r: between 0 and 1000
theta: between 0 and 2π
Assuming the centre of the circle is (0,0), the cartesian coordinates are:
x = r * cos(theta)
y = r * sin(theta)
To ensure that the smaller circle with radius 50 is inside the big circle, just limit r to be between 0 and 950 instead.

I'm not sure if I understand your problem correctly, but I think you can use circle formula for your coordinates. In a circle, we always have:
X^2+Y^2=R^2
so if you select x = spawnX + rand(-1000,1000), then you can calculate possible y range with aforementioned formula.

Computer Graphics: Rotating a polygon

Purpose
I'm implementing a polygon rotation with Java AWT.
I'm already able to draw polygons on the screen, and I'd like to apply a rotation matrix manually upon my polygons coordinates (rotation is done around the lookAt point of the user).
What I've already done
In order to rotate the world, the user first clicks on the screen and then drags the mouse around to perform the rotation.
Let's note the first click point as S, the following point from the drag event as L, and the center of the screen as C.
In order to calculate the rotation angle, when first clicking the screen, I keep a vector from C to S: C-S.
Then, when a drag event occurs, I calculate the vector from C to L: C-L.
I then calculate the angle in radians between C-S to C-L, and that's what I apply on my world.
This works well, and the polygon is indeed rotation around the lookAt point.
My problem
The problem occurs when the user finishes a rotation of PI, and then the polygon is rotating backward.
e.g. When the user starts rotating, the angle starts from 0.1.... 0.2... 1.. 2.. 3.. and in value ~3.1 (I assume PI), the values are starting to go down: 3... 2.. 1.. until 0, and vice versa.
This makes sense since the radians range is [0, PI].
I assume the base vector C-S lies on the right side of X axis, and when the rotation goes down below the X axis the polygon is rotating backwards.
However, I have no idea how to keep the polygon rotating in the same direction all the time (when the user performs a full rotation around the polygon).
Edit
Angle function is:
public final double angle(Vector2D v1)
{
double vDot = this.dot(v1) / ( this.length()*v1.length() );
if( vDot < -1.0) vDot = -1.0;
if( vDot > 1.0) vDot = 1.0;
return ((double) (Math.acos( vDot )));
}

This is a problem of the arcus cosine, acos(cos(x)) is a periodic hat function moving up and down in the range of 0 to pi.
In higher dimensions that can not be avoided, as there is no preferred frame of reference, so there is no way to say that phi should really be -phi. In 2 dimensions there is a prefered orientation of the plane so that one can say what is the first and what the second vector and define a unique angle in positive orientation. Rotate the situation so that the first vector comes to lay on the positive real half axis to get the angle and correct quadrant from the coordinates of the rotated second vector.
Easiest to reconstruct is the complex picture, to compute the angle from a=a.x+i*a.y to b=b.x+i*b.y rotate b back by multiplying with the conjugate of a to get an angle from the zero angle resp. the positive real axis,
arg((a.x-i*a.y)*(b.x+i*b.y))
=arg((a.x*b.x+a.y*b.y)+i*(a.x*b.y-a.y*b.x))
=atan2( a.x*b.y-a.y*b.x , a.x*b.x+a.y*b.y )
Note that screen coordinates use the opposite orientation to the cartesian/complex plane, thus change atan2(y,x) to atan2(-y,x) to get an angle in the usual direction.

public Point rotate(Point original, Point vertex, double angle){
Point translated = new Point(original.x - vertex.x, original.y - vertex.y);
int x = (int)Math.round(translated.x * Math.cos(angle) - translated.y * Math.sin(angle));
int y = (int)Math.round(translated.x * Math.sin(angle) + translated.y * Math.cos(angle));
return new Point(vertex.x+x,vertex.y+y);
}
This is a simple rotation method that you can use to rotate a point around a given vertex.

3D rotation of a circle to make the edge cross two points

I am trying to make a circle (actually a flat cylinder) rotate so that the edge crosses two points in world position. These two points can be anywhere on a sphere. The sphere has the same radius and position as the cylinder. the origin of both is [0,0,0].
It's a little bit hard to explain, so I included three pictures that I hope illustrates what I am trying to accomplish.
Here you see what I am trying to accomplish. The yellow circle represents one of the points along the sphere, while the red circle represents the other point. The blue line is actually a flat cylinder going through the sphere, and is rotated so that it goes through both points.
Here is another similar picture, but with the points at different locations.
In this picture one can see the cylinder in full, as the sphere has been hidden.
Now, I am really terrible at math, so I would really love an answer made up of pseudo code or a programming language. And if I should be so lucky, java.
The circles rotation can be represented with either a quaternion or a matrix
So far, what I have tried, is rotating the cylinder with an up vector towards one of the points, and a forward vector towards the other point. But I can't seem to make it work. I have also tried other solutions, most of them involving two rotations (one for each point), but I end up having trouble when combining the rotations.
Here is my current non-working code:
This code makes the circle go through the first point, and then rotates it with an "up vector" towards the same point, this second rotation varies depending on the first point position, and is kind off all over the place.
//calculate direction vector between the two points
point1point2dir.set(point1Pos);
//subtract point two position
point1point2dir.sub(point2Pos);
//normalize
point1point2dir.nor();
//make two quaternions for rotation
Quaternion rot1=new Quaternion();
Quaternion rot2=new Quaternion();
//set first rotation two a rotation between X-axis and point1 position. Vector3.X = (1,0,0)
rot1.set(m.quatUtils.getRot(Vector3.X, point1Pos));
//crossmuliply direction vector between the two points with X-axis
point1point2dir.crs(Vector3.X);
//set the second rotation to a rotation between Z-Axis and the crossmultiplied direction vector
rot2.set(m.quatUtils.getRot(Vector3.Z, point1point2dir));
//multiply the two rotations
rot1.mul(rot2);
//apply the rotation to the cylinders matrix
cylinderMatrix.rotate(rot1);
//the function that gets the quaternion rotation between two vectors
Quaternion getRot(Vector3 pStart, Vector3 pDest) {
start.set(pStart);
dest.set(pDest);
start.nor();
dest.nor();
cosTheta = Vector3.dot(start.x, start.y, start.z, dest.x, dest.y,
dest.z);
rotationAxis.set(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);
if (cosTheta < -1.0f + 0.001f) {
rotationAxis.set(Z_AXIS);
rotationAxis.crs(start);
if (rotationAxis.len2() < 0.01f) {
rotationAxis.set(X_AXIS);
rotationAxis.crs(start);
}
rotationAxis.nor();
resultQuat.set(rotationAxis, 180.0f);
return resultQuat;
}
rotationAxis.set(start);
rotationAxis.crs(dest);
s = (float) Math.sqrt((1 + cosTheta) * 2);
invs = 1.0f / s;
resultQuat.set(rotationAxis.x * invs, rotationAxis.y * invs,
rotationAxis.z * invs, s * 0.5f);
return resultQuat;
}

I would suggest this solution:
Calculate v1 and v2 as the vectors from the center of the sphere to each point that you want the cylinder to pass trough.
Cross product v1 and v2 to get the vector up of the cylinder, let's call it n.
Position the center of the cylinder in the center of the sphere.
Rotate the cylinder using n as vector up.

I figured out the solution! It was actually really simple. I don't know how I managed to bungle the math as much as I did earlier. I actually did spend alot of time on this >:)
Sorry if I wasted anybodys time!
The solution:
find direction vector from point1 (A) to point2 (B).
crossmultiply direction vector with point2 to get (C)
Find the quaternion which represents the rotation from Z-axis to the crossmultiplied direction vector (C), function for doing this included in the code attached to the question.
apply rotation.
Here is the working code (yay):
//the rotation
Quaternion rot=new Quaternion();
//the direction from point1 to point 2 (the point positions are in this case also the direction vectors from center)
point1point2dir.set(point1Pos);
point1point2dir.sub(point2Pos);
point1point2dir.nor();
//crossmultiplied with point2
point1point2dir.crs(point2Pos);
//set the rotation to the rotation between Z-axis and the crossmultiplied direction between point 1 and 2
rot.set(m.quatUtils.getRot(Vector3.Z, point1point2dir));
//apply rotation
ekvatorMatrix.rotate(rot);
And here is the code for the function that returns the quaternion between two vectors:
Quaternion getRot(Vector3 pStart, Vector3 pDest) {
start.set(pStart);
dest.set(pDest);
start.nor();
dest.nor();
cosTheta = Vector3.dot(start.x, start.y, start.z, dest.x, dest.y,
dest.z);
rotationAxis.set(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);
if (cosTheta < -1.0f + 0.001f) {
rotationAxis.set(Z_AXIS);
rotationAxis.crs(start);
if (rotationAxis.len2() < 0.01f) {
rotationAxis.set(X_AXIS);
rotationAxis.crs(start);
}
rotationAxis.nor();
resultQuat.set(rotationAxis, 180.0f);
return resultQuat;
}
rotationAxis.set(start);
rotationAxis.crs(dest);
s = (float) Math.sqrt((1 + cosTheta) * 2);
invs = 1.0f / s;
resultQuat.set(rotationAxis.x * invs, rotationAxis.y * invs,
rotationAxis.z * invs, s * 0.5f);
return resultQuat;
}

Assuming that the initial cylinder is axis aligned with the "circle" ends in positive and negative X direction, and assuming cylinder and sphere is initially unit size (radius=1.0) I would do the following:
Convert the world coordinate representation of the Red and "Yellow" points (let's just for fun call them A and B shall we) to normalized vectors pointing from centre [0,0,0] (from now on called C)
Calculate the angle between CA and CB (which is really just between A and B). Let's call this angle W
Calculate the vector perpendicular to both A and B by doing a cross product. Lets call this new vector D.
Find the rotation matrix that rotates from [0,0,1] to B. Lets call this M1. This can be done in the same way as in point 3 (create a perpendicular vector and rotate identity matrix around it with the angle between the normalized vectors).
Find the rotation matrix that rotates W around D. Let's call this M2
Combine M1 + M2 into M3
You result is M3
This was not tested and so I don't know if it works.

Algorithm to detect the point intersect the semi circle in android Java [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
What algorithm can I use to determine points within a semi-circle?
(11 answers)
Closed 8 years ago.
I have a points x and y and I need to check the point which intersect within a semi- pie.
I need an algorithm to find the point is intersect in the semi circle. for rectangle we have point contains method to check the point intersect the rectangle, but this doesn't work for semi circle segments with start and end angle.
I have created many semi pie segment, when I touch the pie segment, I need to check the point intersect of which segment.

I'm assuming this is speed-critical, and also that you want to be able to specify the semi-circle as having a center and arbitrary start and end angles, so not just a semi-circle but a circular sector. For a semi-circle just make the start and end angles 180 degrees apart, or remove the test against endVector.
Make the test a two-step process. For a given point, first check that it is inside a rectangle enclosing the semi-circle. You can use your existing sort and binary search algorithm for this. If a point is not in the rectangle then reject the point, if it is then test against the semi-circle.
Also, outside of the loop, convert the values specifying the semi-circle into a form that will enable the tests to be done faster:
Convert the radius to radius squared. Compare the distance of a point from the center squared, to the radius squared. This saves a square root when computing the distance.
Convert the start and end angles of the semi-circle to a couple of 2D vectors, and then use these to check whether the point is inside the sector. Then you won't have to use any trig functions like atan2(y, x), which are slow, or do annoying fiddly comparisons to start and end angles and handling the case where angles wrap around from 360 to 0.
pseudo code:
float radiusSquared;
float startVectorX;
float startVectorY;
float endVectorX;
float endVectorY;
float centerX;
float centerY;
void convertSector(float radius, float startAngle, float endAngle)
{
radiusSquared = radius * radius;
startVectorX = cos(startAngle);
startVectorY = sin(startAngle);
endVectorX = cos(endAngle);
endVectorY = sin(endAngle);
}
boolean testPoint(float x, float y)
{
// check if point is within the radius:
float distanceX = x - centerX;
float distanceY = y - centerY;
if((distanceX * distanceX) + (distanceY * distanceY)) > radiusSq)
return false;
// check if point is outside start radius vector using 2D dot-product with normal:
if(((distanceX * -startVectorY) + (distanceY * startVectorX)) < 0.0f)
return false;
// check if point is outside end radius vector using 2D dot-product with normal:
if(((distanceX * -endVectorY) + (distanceY * endVectorX)) > 0.0f)
return false;
return true;
}
The above code will only work for sectors with an internal angle of <= 180 degrees. To test a point against sectors larger than that (i.e. Pac-Man like shapes), test if the point is inside the circle and then test that it is not inside the sector making up the remainder of the circle.