[vatsachak]

Awesome write up. Is the appeal of spherical harmonics in graphics compression?

Like, if you know the third order harmonics that's only 16 values you have to pass around

[djmips]

For sure that's a big reason but it's also a useful basis for doing lighting calculations because of their sphere like nature. They are quite efficient in dynamic scenes and historically used in a lot of precalc to do something akin to real time Global Illumination