Uniform Points on the Unit Sphere S² — Müller–Marsaglia

Method

Points: 5000

Seed

Geodesic grid

show

K-Nearest Neighbors: 10

Speed (ms/frame)

Frames

Rotation (degrees)

Z-Coordinate Distribution

Nearest-Neighbor Distances

Haversine distances to K nearest neighbors. After clicking "Apply Repulsion", both distributions are shown: green (random distribution) transforms to blue (blue noise pattern with more peaked distribution).

What you're seeing

Both methods should yield a uniformly random distribution over the surface of the sphere. A quick check: the z-coordinate should be uniformly distributed over [-1,1]. The histogram at left lets you verify that visually (it should be flat-ish).

Red markers show a geodesic subdivision of the sphere. The Apply Repulsion button runs a few iterations of Thomson electrostatic repulsion on the blue points.