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Ever wish you could have a hoverboard like in Back to the Future II? Now you can... kind of.
The story I ran across this morning was short on technical details, but the hoverboard will only work above a conductive surface and its battery only lasts seven minutes, apparently using magnetism.
"Our engineering team has been amazing, rapidly iterating on design after design. In fact, this our 18th prototype, and we continue to make advances week after week," says the company’s Kickstarter campaign.
"The magic behind the hoverboard lies in its four disc-shaped hover engines. These create a special magnetic field which literally pushes against itself, generating the lift which levitates our board off the ground."
A pledge of $10,000 will get you one of the first production boards. Expected delivery is October 2015.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday October 22 2014, @07:37AM
Wow! OMG! WTF! In my ***! They are up to the eighteenth prototype? Can anyone possibly comprehend what this means? Any time you get up to an eighteenth prototype, it means that your anti-gravity device is legit! (Or you are just inordinately stubborn at persisting in the face of absolute and total failure.) Just wait until the get to the beta version! Prototype 36 should be the cat's pajamas, or require 1.21 Giga-joules. We await a viable commercial offering in the standard ten years from now.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday October 22 2014, @04:36PM
I saw it again this morning on CBS News. They had a clip of a working prototype, I found it here. [cnet.com]
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday October 22 2014, @04:49PM
Yeah... my prototype only goes up to 11!
It used to only go to 10, but then i thought "why not make it go to 11, you know for when i need just a little more... there you go: up to 11 now!"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 22 2014, @10:08PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by monster on Thursday October 23 2014, @03:11PM
Man, your sarcasm is way unwarranted in this case.
It's not an anti-gravity device, it's a magnetic levitator, FFS. It's proper science and has been tested many times, like with that frog video in that other comment. Looks like their great achievement is being able to put powerful enough batteries in the board to make it levitate without the need of an external device and that is indeed cool. Also, what's wrong with prototyping? So you get a first device that barely keeps itself over the ground, so make some changes to the design, build it again, an so on... and after a few iterations you have a device reliable enough to be shown.
It may be the case that this device is not groundbreaking (he he) or that it still has to be refined some more to be really marketable, but this is the kind of article that so many people around here seems to want instead of political news or systemd flamewars.