How can I plot a 3d vector fast in matlab?

Question

I'm working on a project which includes use of accelerometer and gyroscope to get the orientation an object. I can pass the 3d orientation vector from arduino to matlab via serial communication.

I want to plot the vector in matlab to make real time analysis. I'm using quiver3d and drawnow functions in a loop to plot the vector but quiver3d function is very slow so I can see the orientation of object after like 20 seconds later.

Is there any way to plot 3d vectors faster?

Thanks.

Answer 1

quiver plot may be too much for plotting only one vector in 3-D. You can achieve a similar plot by using a simple plot3 such as the one plotted below.

In this plot, the origin of the vector is the blue dot, and the direction is given by the red line.

The code

%v is the direction of the vector (3 cartesian coordinates)
v = sort(randn(100,3));
v = bsxfun(@rdivide,v,sqrt(sum(v.^2,2)));

%xyz the origin of the vector
ind = linspace(-pi,pi,100);
x = cos(ind);
y = sin(ind);
z = ind;

%the plotting function
figure
for ii = 1:numel(ind)
    plot3(x(ii),y(ii),z(ii),'bo'); %origin in blue
    set(gca,'XLim', [-3 3], 'YLim', [-3 3], 'ZLim', [-3 3]);
    hold on;
    hl = plot3( linspace(x(ii), x(ii)+v(ii,1),10),  ...
                linspace(y(ii), y(ii)+v(ii,2),10),  ...
                linspace(z(ii), z(ii)+v(ii,3),10),  ...
                'r'); %direction in red
    view(80,10);
    pause(0.1);
    %clf
end