Engineers at Facebook Inc.-owned Oculus VR have invented “flicks,” new units of time that could make life easier for visual effects creators working in film, video games and other media.

A flick, which is somehow short for “frame tick,” is slightly longer than a nanosecond at 1/705,600,000 of a second. Oculus arrived at this oddly specific number because it evenly divides into common video frame rates and audio sampling rates used for various types of media.

This is important because visual effects programs divide media into both individual frames and one-second chunks that do not divide evenly into one another. Even calculations made with nanoseconds end up with minuscule fractions of a second that get rounded off, which cause the sync among the visual effect, the video and the audio to be less and less accurate over time.

Oculus hopes to make flicks a new standard for visual effects, as frame rates can vary wildly between different media. For example, movies run at 24 frames per second, but video games are run at 30 to 60 frames per second or even higher. Screens, projectors and other displays also operate at their own refresh rates, which use hertz to measure how quickly the device can display a new image. Most computer monitors operate at 60hz, but some models now support 144hz frame rates. Meanwhile, the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset runs at 90hz for each display.

The original idea for flicks came from former Facebook employee Christopher Horvath, who also previously worked at Oculus Story Studio. The documentation for flicks claims that Horvath’s idea started with a technical question that he posted publicly on Facebook in 2017, and he slowly refined the time unit based on feedback and suggestions. Horvath called flicks “the result of the most fertile Facebook technical discussion I’ve had yet.”

Oculus has opened up the C++ source code for its new time units, which is available through the company’s GitHub page. The software license for the code is copyrighted by Facebook, but it permits anyone to change and redistribute the code as long as they keep the copyright notice and do not use Facebook’s name to promote products made with the code.

Photo: Pranavian Father Time via photopin (license)