I remember some demos from the flash 8 days when bitmapData and normal maps (displacement maps) were introduced showing some examples with a spherical displacement

it was not andre still he has a blog entry and demos as well:
http://blog.andre-michelle.com/2005/...mentmapfilter/

another something I found:
http://justin.everett-church.com/ind...es-on-spheres/

demo & code:
http://makc.coverthesky.com/FlashFX/ffx.php?id=8

in the end I could not find the article anymore (quite scientific but it used displacement and some higher math to do very accurate sphere mapping from a stretched texture in Flash)