It was the hoax that crushed the spirits of Back to the Future fans everywhere. When skating legend Tony Hawk appeared in a YouTube video spruiking a hoverboard inspired by the 1989 classic film, many people readily believed that technology had finally caught up with imagination.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Now, Hawk has gone some way to making amends, appearing in a new YouTube video test-riding a real, if far less thrilling, hoverboard.
"This is real, folks," Hawk assures viewers in the latest video.
 
"This is the real hoverboard right here, so forget everything you know."
Developed by the Californian startup Arx Pax, and funded by a Kickstarter campaign, the Hendo Hoverboard doesn't quite match Marty McFly's air-riding escapades in Back to the Future Part II, but nonetheless, the rider is airborne.
 
As Hawk's demonstration shows, the Hendo Hoverboard allows the rider to levitate about an inch off the ground while riding it more or less like a skateboard.
At $11,500 a piece, the traditional skateboard is not about to be rendered obsolete any time soon, but if the Kickstarter page is anything to go by, it seems there is a hoverboard market out there. With 26 days left to run, the campaign has already eclipsed its goal of $287,000, generating $528,000 from nearly 3,000 backers.
The technology behind the Hendo Hoverboard, called Magnetic Field Architecture, lies in its four disc-shaped hover engines, which induce an opposing magnetic field in the surface substrate generating the hovering effect.
CEO Greg "Hendo" Henderson believes the MFA technology has world-changing potential.
"It enables a new generation of lift and motion technology that will change the way we view transportation," Henderson says on the Kickstarter page.
"Additional applications for MFA technology are virtually limitless – from business, to industry, to healthcare, and beyond."
