Facebook has invented its own measure of time, dubbed ‘flicks’, defined as 1/705,600,000 of a second or about 1.42 nanoseconds.
It aims to give CGI artists and code writers the tools to make sure videos in apps run smoothly – something that has so far been tricky for developers.
The flick is the smallest unit of time larger than a nanosecond and has been created for working with moving footage, virtual reality and video gaming content.
One example of when flicks are useful is in video game programming.
Most games display at 60 frames per second, when running at highest quality.
This means that the software running the graphics gets 16.667 milliseconds to calculate how to recreate the characters and settings of the game universe in pixels on the screen.
That number is tricky to deal with and can create what are called rounding errors, which can hinder the smoothness of animations.
The new time unit, designed for the coding language C++, should simplify this process.
If widely adopted, Facebook will have set a new standard industry standard for working with units like frames per second and kilohertz.