Designed to help developers keep video effects in sync, a Facebook engineer has invented a unit of time called Flick.

Flicks are used to generate visual effects for media such as television and film, in the programming language C++.

A new unit is 1/705,600,000 of a second – “the next unit of time after a nanosecond”, according to the BBC. 

An Oxford University researcher said to the BBC: “flicks may help virtual reality developers deal with latency or delay.

‘Measuring the time between media frames’

“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.”

The unit also gives programmers the opportunity to measure the time between media frames without having to use fractions.

Written by Leah Alger