Facebook engineer invents new unit of time, but loses his job before it gets approved

FAN Editor

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.”

One of the creators of Flicks is Christopher Horvath, a former architect with Facebook’s Story Studio. Horvath, who left Facebook in May, was as surprised as anyone to see that his invention had made it into the real world.

Here’s what he posted his Facebook page.

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.”

Facebook shuttered the unit after deciding it didn’t want a stand-alone studio, and Horvath posted in May that he’d left the company.

But his influence lives.

According to Facebook, Flick “is the smallest time unit which is LARGER than a nanosecond.”

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