# Computing a real power of a quaternion

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An alternative formulation of the popular slerp function is:

my question is how is this actually computed in practice? Is it done by first finding the polar form and then multiplying the cosine and sine? I believe this is somewhat similar to how you would do it for complex numbers.

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Managed to figure it out, also thanks to boost for their exp function

	// Raise a quaternion to a real power
template <typename S>
inline quaternion<S> pow(const quaternion<S> &q, const S ex)
{
return exp(ex * log(q) );
}

// Raise a unit quaternion to a real power
template <typename S>
inline quaternion<S> unit_pow(const quaternion<S> &q, const S ex)
{
static const S C = S(1) - std::numeric_limits<S>::epsilon();

// Check for the case of an identity quaternion.
// This will protect against divide by zero
if ( std::abs(real(q)) > C )
return q;

S a = acos( real(q) );
S u = a*ex;

return quaternion<S>(std::cos(u),
imag(q) * (std::sin(u) / std::sin(a)));
}

// logarithm of a quaternion.
// when q is unit this gives { 0 + acos(r) * v/|v| }
template <typename S>
inline quaternion<S> log ( const quaternion<S> &q )
{
S N = std::sqrt(norm(q));

return quaternion<S>( std::log(N),
std::acos(real(q) / N) * normalize(imag(q)) );
}

// exponential of a quaternion
template <typename S>
inline quaternion<S> exp( const quaternion<S> &q )
{
S z = length(imag(q));
S w = std::sin(z) / z;

return std::exp(real(q)) *
quaternion<S>(std::cos(z), w * imag(q));
}


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