Flick (time)

A flick is a unit of time equivalent to exactly 1/705,600,000 of a second. The figure was chosen so that frequencies of 24, 25, 30, 48, 50, 60, 90, 100 and 120 Hz, as well as 1/1000 divisions of all those, can be represented with integers.[1] The unit was launched in January 2018 by Facebook.[2] A flick is approximately 1.42 × 10−9 s, which makes it larger than a nanosecond but much smaller than a microsecond.

A similar unit for integer representation of temporal points was proposed in 2004 under the name TimeRef, splitting a second into 14,112,000 parts.[3] This makes 1 TimeRef equivalent to 50 Flicks.

Etymology

The word flick is a portmanteau of frame (as in e.g. animation frame) and tick (as in computer instruction cycle).

References

  1. ↑ https://github.com/OculusVR/Flicks
  2. ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42787529
  3. ↑ Raphaël Troncy, Jean Carrive, Steffen Lalande and Jean-Philippe Poli (2004). "A Motivating Scenario for Designing an Extensible Audio-Visual Description Language".

Why Did Facebook Invent A New Unit Of Time? The "Flick" Explained With Math. YouTube video:

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