This applet is designed to build intuition about cross products of
3-vectors. The coordinates of V and W can be changes either by
using the forward and back buttons to move them through the range of
values or by entering values in the appropriate text box. The
value in a text box does not have to be in the given range.
- The applet has a control window and a graphics window.
- The graphical window is the cross product window. It
displays the vectors V and W, as well as the cross product vector VxW. It also displays the parallelogram with V and W as
edges. The magnitude of VxW is the area of the parallelogram.
- The control window gives the coefficients of V, W, and VxW. It also gives the lengths of these vectors and the cosine of
the angle between V and W.