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Facebook engineer invents a new unit of time

Facebook’s VR division has come up with a new unit of time to measure the speed of digital audio and video

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Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., speaks during the Oculus Connect 4 product launch event in San Jose, California, U.S. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
CNBC

By John Shinal

Facebook’s virtual reality division has come up with a new unit of time — called Flicks — to measure the speed of digital audio and video.

In an online forum used by developers of open source software, the company described Flicks as “a unit of time, slightly larger than a nanosecond that exactly subdivides media frame rates and sampling frequencies.”

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One of the creators of Flicks is Christopher Horvath, a former architect with Facebook’s Story Studio. Horvath left that team in May and began later that month at Facebook’s social virtual reality unit, according to a representative from Oculus.

He noted in a Facebook post that his invention had made it into the real world:

Story Studio, which Facebook closed last year, was nominated for an Emmy for the VR film “Dear Angelica.” Horvath won an Emmy for an earlier Oculus film called “Henry.”

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