Thu. Mar 28th, 2024
Invented the new unit of time: Flick

Facebook has invented a new unit of time which is named as flick. This unit of time is similar to as hours, minutes or seconds. Flick is said to be the smallest unit of time, only to be a little greater than nanosecond.

This is said to exactly divide the media frame rates and sampling frequencies. It is one seven hundred and five million six hundred thousandth of a second. It is designed for people who find that a nanosecond is too short, but a microsecond is just too long. The word flick is said to be a contraction of the words “frame tick”.

Facebook needs this unit of time to be a part of its interest in virtual reality content for its Oculus VR division. Christopher Horvath, who is known as the visual artist for movies like The Day After Tomorrow and Star Trek had raised the issue to resolve as a question posted on Facebook in 2017. He now works for Facebook’s social virtual reality division.

“When working creating visual effects for film, television, and other media, it is common to run simulations or other time-integrating processes which subdivide a single frame of time into a fixed, integer number of subdivisions. It is handy to be able to accumulate these subdivisions to create exact 1-frame and 1-second intervals, for a variety of reasons.” Horvart said for the problems visual artist usually face. This unit of time will help to resolve to work for single frames while creating content. This has usually been a nightmare for the artists.

Flick will be designed to help measure individual frame duration for video frame rates. So if the video watched is in 24Hz or 120Hz, we will be able to use Flick in order to sync everything while using whole integers. The use of this unit is still theoretical and has to be seen in practice by the C++ programmers to develop and bring it in use.