I am looking for matrices $A\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ with $m>n$, $A^TA=\frac{m}{n}I$ and $diag(AA^T)=(1\ \dots\ 1)$ where $diag$ denotes the diagonal. Do such matrices have a name? An example for such a matrix would be an $8\times 3$ matrix with the coordinates of a cube centered at the origin as rows. Is the matrix $A$ for every pair $(m,n)$ uniquely determined up to right multiplication with an orthogonal matrix? How are the $m$ points given by the rows of $A$ distributed over the $(n-1)$-dimensional sphere? My motivation is that I have an unknown $x\in \mathbb{R}^n$. I assume that I can measure the scalar product $a^Tx$ with any unit vector $a\in S^{n-1}$. The measurements are assumed to be i.i.d. Now we assume we have $m$ measurements and write the corresponding vectors as the rows of a matrix $A\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ and the vectors as a matrix $b\in \mathbb{R}^m$. The best possible reconstruction (see Gauss-Markov) of $x$ is given by the least square solution $(A^TA)^{-1}A^Tb$ where $b\in \mathbb{R}^n$ denotes the measurements. The covariance matrix for the reconstruction is $(A^TA)^{-1}$. This means that if $A$ satisfies the properties above then the components of the reconstructed $x$ are uncorrelated. Also I think that $A$ gives us the best possible way to measure $x$, i.e. minimizing the standard deviation.