Facebook Flick

A Facebook engineer has invented a new unit of time that could be used by developers to keep video effects in sync.

22:04 26 January 2018

A Facebook engineer has invented a flick, a new unit of time that could be used to help developers keep video effects in sync, which can in turn help create better virtual reality experiences. Flick is 1/705,600,000 of a second - the next unit of time after a nanosecond.

 

Christopher Horvath publicly shared his idea in early 2017 in Facebook. He has since made modifications to the new measurement based on comments that he received. 

 

Reacting on the news, an Oxford University researcher, said: "Very often in academic literature, you have this notion of presence and immersion,"

 

"Immersion is the engagement you feel with a computer game. Presence is the notion of your brain feeling that you are there.

 

"Presence is very, very easy to break. I think perhaps a very fixed way of describing these time steps allows for developers to have a bit more flexibility in dealing with latency issues and making sure videos stay in sync."