TIP: Sphere nodes are specified in the geometry field of a Shape node; they may not be children of a Transform or Group node.

Browser implementors will make different compromises between rendering speed and the quality of spheres (and cones and cylinders and text). They may choose to display very coarse-looking spheres to make scenes render faster, which is good if you want your world to display smoothly on a wide variety of machines, but is bad if you want to guarantee that your world maintains a certain image quality. If maintaining quality is important, describe your shapes using the polygon-based primitives. To minimize file transmission time, you can generate the polygons using a Script. For example, this prototype will generate an approximation of a one-unit-radius Sphere, given the number of latitude and longitude samples:

  #VRML V2.0 utf8
  PROTO LatLongSphere [
    field SFInt32 numLat 4
    field SFInt32 numLong 4 ]
  {
    # Empty IndexedFaceSet, filled in by Script based
    #    on PROTO fields
    DEF IFS IndexedFaceSet {
      coord DEF C Coordinate { }
      texCoord DEF TC TextureCoordinate { }
      creaseAngle 3.14
    }
    DEF S Script {
      field SFInt32 numLat IS numLat
      field SFInt32 numLong IS numLong
      eventOut MFVec3f c_changed
      eventOut MFVec2f tc_changed
      eventOut MFInt32 ci_changed
      url "javascript:
        function initialize() {
          var r, angle, x, y, z;
          var i, j, polyIndex;
          // Compute coordinates, texture coordinates:
          for (i = 0; i < numLat; i++) {
            y = 2 * ( i / (numLat-1) ) - 1;
            r = Math.sqrt( 1 - y*y );
            for (j = 0; j < numLong; j++) {
              angle = 2 * Math.PI * j / numLong;
              x = -Math.sin(angle)*r;
              z = -Math.cos(angle)*r;
              c_changed[i*numLong+j] = new SFVec3f(x,y,z);
              tc_changed[i*numLong+j] =
              tc_channew SFVec2f( j/numLong, i/(numLat-1) );
            }
          }
          // And compute indices:
          for (i = 0; i < numLat-1; i++) {
            for (j = 0; j < numLong; j++) {
              polyIndex = 5*(i*numLong+j);
              ci_changed[polyIndex+0] = i*numLong+j;
              ci_changed[polyIndex+1] = i*numLong+(j+1)%numLong;
              ci_changed[polyIndex+2] = (i+1)*numLong+(j+1)%numLong;
              ci_changed[polyIndex+3] = (i+1)*numLong+j;
              ci_changed[polyIndex+4] = -1;  // End-of-polygon
            }
          }
        }"
    }
    ROUTE S.c_changed TO C.set_point
    ROUTE S.tc_changed TO TC.set_point
    ROUTE S.ci_changed TO IFS.set_coordIndex
  } # end PROTO
  Shape {
    appearance Appearance { material Material { } }
    geometry LatLongSphere { numLat 16 numLong 16 }
  }