Oculus creates Flick a new unit of time and is larger than a nanosecond

Facebook Oculus Team has introduced a new unit of time even though its magnitude is too small to be of any real use to the general populace. That is simply because flicks are just larger than a nanosecond, which sort of acts as a middle ground between a nanosecond and a second.

Specifically, if a second is sliced into 705,600,000 portions than flicks would equal just one part of it. A nanosecond comes to 1/1,000,000,000 of a second, which makes a flick to be of 1.41723356 nanoseconds duration.

1 flick (frame-tick) = 1/705600000 second

Facebook defined a flick as a unit of time that is ‘slightly larger than a nanosecond that exactly subdivides media frame rates and sampling frequencies.’ This should also somewhat shed some light on the need to invent a new unit of time, that of measuring a speed of digital audio and video. This again is of crucial importance to programmers and game developers where frame rates and screen refresh rates are measured in units hundreds of times less than a second.

Some of the most popular programming languages such as C++ usually provides means to map such extreme frame rates though those are regarding nanoseconds. Since that does not evenly divide most frame rates, the new flick solves that issue and is considered to be a boon for the programmers engaged in designing CGI visual effects.

Interestingly, while Facebook might be celebrating the official introduction of a new unit of time, one of the main proponents of the same – Christopher Horvath is no more associated with the social media company.

For the uninitiated, Horvath has been one of the prime driving force behind Story Studio. However, with Facebook deciding to shut down the unit with the aim to better streamline its content developing efforts, Horvath called it quits and shifted to greener pastures. Horvath though is ecstatic on hearing the news of his creation getting officially accepted.