Calculate the cross product of two 3D vectors.
The cross product of two 3D vectors produces a third vector perpendicular to both, with magnitude equal to the area of the parallelogram they span. It is used in computer graphics, physics simulations, and 3D geometry calculations within ML pipelines.
Cross Product
a × b = (a_y*b_z - a_z*b_y, a_z*b_x - a_x*b_z, a_x*b_y - a_y*b_x)
The cross product as a vector operation is specific to 3D (and 7D) because it relies on the structure of the space to produce a unique perpendicular vector. In other dimensions, the wedge product generalizes this concept.
It is used in 3D point cloud processing, computer vision for surface normal estimation, robotics, and any ML application involving 3D geometric reasoning.