If you're one of the many who has pined over a hoverboard ever since you saw Marty McFly take his non-powered pink Mattel board over water, you're in luck. A faint sliver of hope that actual hoverboards could exist in our lifetime has arrived. Yes. Someone has invented a working hoverboard, though it bears little resemblence in appearance or function to what we all want hoverboards to be.
Hendo, a company that claims it "designs, develops, manufactures and sells hoverboards," has created a Kickstarter campaign which they hope will raise enough funding to mass produce their prototype. And that prototype is Hendo's 18th iteration of its hoverboard design, with the company claiming it makes continual tweeks to their boards "week after week."
Right now, a $100 contribution to the campaign will get you a 5 minute ride; $150 gets you a miniature display of a concept hoverboard; $449 gets you a non-working replica of a Hendo board; and $10,000 gets you one of the first 10 prototypes in existence.
The design appears pretty straightforward. The Hendo design consists of a flat deck with four "disc-shaped hover engines' mounted to its bottom and some battery cells wedged inside the deck itself. The board's engines create a "special magnetic field" around the bottom of the board that allows the board and its rider to levitate.
At this point in time, Hendo's boards can only hover above "non-ferromagnetic" conductors. Their site claims they are primarily using sheets of "commonly available metals" in order to achieve levitation. However, they also promise that they are working on deriving new surfaces to ride on.
And Hendo isn't resting on its potential laurels just yet. They've already posted designs for their next hoverboard design (which is a great way to lure in investors) and it looks more like a hoverboard you'd actually want to buy. It's sleek and superfuturistic looking, however, for the forseable future, hoverboards will be confined to areas covered in those commonly available metals, which means riding on the street (or over water) is still a ways away.
But the new design is worth checking out. Head over to Hendo's site or their Kickstarter page to get a look at both the current design and what's to come.