3D Coordinates

The image below shows both Polar and Cartesian coordinate systems. The orientation of these axes is used by all beamforming pages on this site.

There doesn't seem to be any rigid standard for the orientation of the Cartesian axis. The decision to have the Y axis point upwards was mainly to simplify the integration with some 3D software APIs, such as Java3D.

Note: The calculation of theta uses the atan2 function.

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