Facebook Has Created a New Unit of Time Called the “Flick”

Yep, Facebook (or rather, the Oculus team over at Facebook) has created a new unit of time, and no, it’s not a gimmick. A “flick,” as it’s being called, is a combination of “frame-tick,” and it’s “the smallest time unit which is LARGER than a nanosecond,” measuring 1/705,600,000 of a second.

Okay, so now you’re probably thinking, “What’s the point?” Well, it turns out that this new unit of measuring time is actually quite useful, as it’s a number that divides evenly into numerous frame rates and frequencies commonly used in encoding video and audio, and it can be used to measure the time between frames of systems running at different rates (24, 30, 120 Hz, etc.).

Using flicks, you end up with an integer rather than a fraction, which is what you would normally get when working with seconds and nanoseconds. This is a huge plus because fractions can be problematic, in that they’re annoying to work with and can result in computational error. It would seem that the flick is actually a pretty simple solution to a longstanding problem.

To learn more, read a summary here. You can find the code here.