[anonymous]

Something else I'm interested in is if somebody has ever tried using Pierce's projection for texturing spheres or doing environment mapping. It seems like it would be perfect for the job - it's square so it would fit perfectly in a texture, it can be tiled and the formula for mapping a point on the sphere from spherical coordinates to uv coordinates on the texture seems simple enough.

[pmjordan]

The main problem I see is that it's a nonlinear projection and thus generating one procedurally on the GPU (render to texture) is rather challenging. Hardware support for cube maps places them in a sweet spot between efficiency, accuracy, practicality for generating and practicality for applying.