Facebook Invents New Unit of Time Smaller Than 1 Microsecond

Facebook has invented a new unit of time smaller than 1 microsecond.

Christopher Horvath - inventor of flick, which is an abbreviation for "frame tick", a phrase originating from the film industry.

Why does Facebook need a new unit of time? It all comes down to its subsidiary Oculus VR and its big bet on virtual reality.

For Horvath, who has previously worked for major studios like Pixar, Weta Digital, and Industrial Light & Magic, it was somewhat of a passion project.

In movies, video games, and other screen-based media, their creators have to think very quickly.

For example, most movies are shot at 24 frames per second, which means the movie shows 24 continuous still images every second to "trick" the viewer into thinking everything is moving.

The problem is, as Horvath describes, the math gets “messy” when we try to work with a frame at some scale.

At 24 frames per second (FPS), each frame lasts about 0.04166666667 seconds, or 41666666.669 nanoseconds. Those numbers don't look very nice, with the odd number repeating itself endlessly.

As a result, it can be difficult for programmers and artists trying to work accurately with these ratios.

That's where Facebook's flick comes in. It can represent a frame with an even number, which looks pretty cool.

For example, at the 24 FPS rate of most movies, each frame is 29,400,000. At 60 FPS, a rate considered desirable for video games, each frame is 11,760,000 flicks long.

It is a number that makes multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction easy, because we don't have to worry about decimal points.

For its part, Facebook has released its documentation on the invention and is now making flick open source, meaning anyone can download it and add support for the unit into their own software.

That also means that the flick could become a standard unit of time—if not on your watch, then in the visual arts.