Spherical Texture

Is there some technique for representing spherical textures, or other spherical blocks of data? RAM is naturally suited to representing linear and rectangular textures and data, but how would you represent a sphere? It's easy enough to just map a rectangle onto a sphere (and vice versa), but that has the downside of not having consistent data density. It would be nice to use something that more naturally corresponds to the shape of the sphere, and accomdates things like rotation and translation of the data.

I'm sure there must be something like this already out there, but google doesn't seem to have anything useful.

[639 byte] By [MarkFairchilda] at [2007-10-2 5:05:12]