Despite the endless memes, internet jokes, and countless hoaxes, some engineers have maintained the search for the holy grail of urban transportation: the hoverboard. A Kickstarter from Hendo Hoverboards, the brainchild of engineers Greg and Jill Henderson, has ballooned since yesterday, promising, "the world's first REAL hoverboard," for the low, low price of $10,000.A video of a levitating kid in jeans and a lab coat shredding the inside of a half pipe validates this promise, while the rest of the Kickstarter page explains how the board works. "The enabling technologies existed, but no one had yet been able to align them to bring a hoverboard forth," the description begins. The Hendo floats using four disc-shaped hover engines, which push against one another to create an inch-high bubble of magnetic force between the board and the ground. Combined with an array of stabilizing apparatuses, Hendo says that their new engine is a sustainable and relatively cheap alternative to other magnetic field-generating devices.
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The biggest drawback to the Hendo is that, in its current form, it can only hover over surfaces that also happen to be non-ferromagnetic conductors, e.g. copper plating. The hoverboard developer's answer to the dilemma is almost as cool as the device itself: a top-of-the-line hoverpark. "One day we expect to have hoverboards that can effortlessly float over any medium (even water!)," they say, but in the meantime, raising funds to erect a massive hoverboard skate park is the next best thing.
On top of the hoverboard and the hoverpark, Hendo is also kickstarting a developer's kit for hover technology, dubbed, The Whitebox. Just as its name implies, The Whitebox is a sleek, endlessly modifiable white cube enabled with the same engine technology that keeps the hoverboard afloat. "The most important piece of it all for me is the idea of taking away the limitations of how we think about problems in general," Greg Henderson told Engadget. "Not just thinking outside the box, but off the page."The kit is included with a $299 contribution to the Hendo Kickstarter, allowing today's makers to invent applications for the magnetic engine that the Hendersons haven't yet imagined. That will be a challenge in and of itself, since Henderson already has big ideas for Hendo's post-hoverboard future. The original design "came from the idea of hovering a building out of harm's way," he went on to Engadget. "If you can levitate a train that weighs 50,000 kilograms, why not a house?" The tech publication reports that he already has a safety device in his home with the ability to levitate the entire building in the event of an earthquake.
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His endgame involves fully floating buildings, a possibility that seems less and less farfetched the more we find out about Hendo's capabilities. While we wait for the world to get a little more like the opening scene from Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life, though, we're more than happy to try to reinvent the ollie on the Hendo hoverboard.
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