Facebook has created a new unit of time called flicks that will help visual content run more smoothly.
The vast majority of Facebook users will not have to deal with flicks of time, which are 1/705,600,000 of a second, or about 1.42 nanoseconds, the Daily Mail reported, but at Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality subsidiary, it will mean a lot to programmers who have to deal with such small fractions of time to make video and audio work seamlessly.
"In other words, the flick is a brilliant time unit meant to fix time problems for people and computers who deal with video and audio content production and distribution on a regular basis," according to BGR.com. "As for Facebook, the Oculus team developed the flick, so they're probably using it for VR projects. It's a time unit that brings balance to the force if you will."
If flick is widely adopted, it could establish a new industry standard for working with units like frames per second and kilohertz, the Daily Mail said. The new measurements could lead to more high-quality content appearing on Facebook and elsewhere online, which would be of interest to more Facebook users.
Programmers and computer-generated imagery artists have to deal with such fractions of time that make calculations difficult, but the flick, designed for coding language C++, is meant to simply the equations.
They run into difficult computations and rounding errors in calculating the 16.667 milliseconds they get to create the character and settings of a game at 60 frames per seconds, when games are running at its highest quality, per the Daily Mail.
TechCrunch said, for example, the 1/24th of a second around "which the entire film industry is based on is equal to 0.0416666666666666… on and on forever (even attempting to use nanoseconds to represent these durations ends up creating fractions of nanoseconds). So it may be abbreviated for convenience to 0.04167. Easier to remember, but not numerically exact, and who knows when that 'extra' value might break something?"
The tech website said flicks turns those complicated fractions into round numbers, making it easier for programmers. For example, 1/24th of a second turns into 29,400,000 flicks, 1/120th becomes 5,880,000 flicks and 1/44,100th of a second becomes 16,000 flicks.