Throughout the history of movies, television and even video games, there has been a significant increase in use of video effects throughout these medias. New movies always testing the boundaries for using the most elaborate special effects. It is an ongoing race towards improving these video effects among producers.
The newest improvement that has been “invented” is the flick. The flick is a new unit of time, measuring 1/705,600,000 of a second, which is one unit smaller than a nanosecond. Christopher Horvath, an engineer working for Facebook was the creator of this new unit of time. Now, I think a common thought is, “what in the world would this be used for?” These flicks main use will be to generate visual effects for film, television and other media. This can be beneficial to reduce errors such as stutters in graphics that are used throughout mainstream media.
Other researches have exclaimed that the flick could play a significant role throughout the virtual reality game experiences. The future of this still developing virtual reality game idea is a very hard task to tackle. To allow users to actually feel submerged in the game, the delay time must be minimum, and if it is even slightly off, it can add up to a considerable amount. The flick could create more fluency throughout these virtual reality games to make them even more realistic than they already are.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42787529
The concept of “the flick” is a little confusing, but that’s probably because it is meant to be used by videographers and similar occupations. The whole idea seems odd to people who are not in the film industry, like myself, but based on the reasoning behind it, I could potentially see how “the flick” would be used to evaluate time frames. It seems like this new invention is limited to only a few people, which is why I’m also confused that Facebook came up with the idea. I’m not sure how they intend to use it, but I noticed the virtual reality industry also came up with a similar idea.
Oculus, which is known for the Oculus Rift virtual reality device, has apparently partnered with Facebook in developing this concept. Christopher Horvath, who is credited with the idea, is actually an Oculus Studio Architect and wrote a post about “the flick” back in October 2016. Nonetheless, this new invention can improve the video game world by creating a more realistic VR experience. This can be done by using “the flick” to observe video frames with almost perfect timing. Furthermore, this would make programming a little easier because it would allow programmers to work with more precision and detail. New technology and inventions are usually somewhat unexpected, but “the flick” was a complete shot in the dark because I don’t think many people expected the creation of a new unit of time.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/01/oculus-creates-a-new-open-source-unit-of-time-to-measure-frame-rates/