tantek.comWhy are there two pentagons in the otherwise hex-tiled American continents displayed in TRON: Legacy’s Rectifier Globe computer graphics?
I was watching the TRON: Legacy 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray remaster (only my second time watching the 4K remaster) in the background earlier today when I sensed something “off” in the land mass tiling of the rotating globe graphic.
I paused the video and after less than a minute of scrutinizing the dark globe with orange outlined hexagon tiling, spotted a single pentagon (among the hexagons) inside the 2d projections of the American continents. See if you can spot it.
After writing the first draft of this post, I double-checked the graphic and found one more pentagon!
https://web.archive.org/web/20221226082428/https://i0.wp.com/ilikeinterfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/01_38_01001251.png (A still of the Rectifier Globe from TRON:Legacy, showing glowing orange outlines of the Americas, themselves filled with a hexagonal tiling pattern except for one pentagon.) https://ilikeinterfaces.com/2015/03/24/map-ui-tron-legacy/
Credit: Image from https://ilikeinterfaces.com/2015/03/24/map-ui-tron-legacy/, fair use from Walt Disney, Inc.
The first pentagon I spotted is in the northwest quadrant of South America, and clearly visible at time index 1:38:03. The second pentagon is near Alaska. Now I can't unsee either. How did only two pentagons make it in there? Seems unlikely to be an accident or rendering bug. The only thing I can think of is the designer/artist(s) that created the graphic animation placed the two pentagons deliberately. But why?
GMUNK Studio’s post about the Rectifier Globe (https://gmunk.com/TRON-Rectifier-Globe) doesn’t mention the pentagons.
Yes, I know the math/geometry about how you can’t tile a sphere with only hexagons, that several pentagons are necessary at various points on a sphere to stitch together the hexagons. This is just two small pentagons, not several, and the Rectifier Globe only has/uses hex-tiling for the land masses, not the entire sphere. Nor is the hex-tiling “perfect” by any measure. The hexagonal edges of the continents don’t match-up with hex-tiling much (most?) of the way around the coasts of the continents either, so it can’t have been to fix that.
Are those two pentagons merely imperfections (necessary or accidental)? Or an Easter-egg or secret reference of sorts from the graphic artist(s)?
I searched the web and could not find any answers or even mentions of these two pentagons in this graphic. Did anyone notice them previously?
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