[R] Visualizing Points on a Sphere

[Matt Shotwell]

That's interesting. You might also like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises%E2%80%93Fisher_distribution

I'm not sure how to plot the wireframe sphere, but you can visualize the
points by transforming to Cartesian coordinates like so:

u <- runif(1000,0,1)
v <- runif(1000,0,1)
theta <- 2 * pi * u
phi   <- acos(2 * v - 1)
x <- sin(theta) * cos(phi)
y <- sin(theta) * sin(phi)
z <- cos(theta)
library("lattice")
cloud(z ~ x + y)

-Matt

On Fri, 2011-02-25 at 14:21 +0100, Lorenzo Isella wrote:
> Dear All,
> I need to plot some points on the surface of a sphere, but I am not sure 
> about how to proceed to achieve this in R (or if it is suitable for this 
> at all).
> In any case, I am not looking for really fancy visualizations; for 
> instance you can consider the images between formulae 5 and 6 at
> 
> http://bit.ly/hOgK9h
> 
> Any suggestion is appreciated.
> Cheers
> 
> Lorenzo
> 
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