# How to use a quaternion in Makie.rotate?

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-use-a-quaternion-in-makie-rotate/104899
**Category:** General Usage
**Tags:** plotting
**Created:** [October 12, 2023, 3:06pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-use-a-quaternion-in-makie-rotate/104899 "2023-10-12T15:06:41Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![\_stla](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/_stla/32/35613_2.png) [@\_stla](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/_stla)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2023, 3:06pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-use-a-quaternion-in-makie-rotate/104899/1 "2023-10-12T15:06:41Z")

</div>

Hello,

Extracted from the doc of **Makie** :

```julia
rotate!(t::Transformable, axis_rot::Quaternion)
rotate!(t::Transformable, axis_rot::AbstractFloat)
rotate!(t::Transformable, axis_rot...)

```

Not very clear to me.

How do we specify a quaternion? Does it require a package?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![contradict](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ac91a4/32.png) [@contradict](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/contradict)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2023, 3:28pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-use-a-quaternion-in-makie-rotate/104899/2 "2023-10-12T15:28:16Z")

</div>

Looks like it is defined in Makie.

```julia
julia> using Makie

julia> Quaternion(1,2,3,4)
4 + 1im + 2jm + 3km

julia> using LinearAlgebra

julia> normalize(rand(Quaternion))
0.8191226636248707 + 0.40652219207787577im + 0.19333957116552272jm + 0.35552437259044173km

```