Translate and rotate data on a sphere

I am working on a problem to rotate a 3D dataset of a plane and place it on the surface of a sphere at a certain elevation and azimuth angle. Here is a pseudo code in MATLAB - any suggestions?

data = rand(100,3);
sphereRadius = 10; azimuth = -70; elevation = 25;
rotm = eul2rotm([azimuth 90-elevation 0]*pi/180)
dataNew = (data-mean(data) + [0 0 sphereRadius])*rotm

Answer 1

[Prathamesh]

Hi @Zaheer Ali,

I understand that you want to rotate a 3D dataset and place it on a sphere at a certain elevation and angle.

You can try these steps:

• Shift your 3D data so that its centroid is at the origin.
• Use “rotm” to rotate this centered data.
• Calculate the specific 3D Cartesian coordinates on the surface of the sphere that correspond to your given “sphereRadius”, “azimuth”, and “elevation”.
• Shift the entire rotated dataset by adding these calculated target coordinates to every point.

This moves the plane from the origin to its final desired location on the sphere's surface.