This is the Hendo, the namesake of an inventor named Greg Henderson, and it’s really more of a technology demo than something that’s going to get you to work in the morning. Right now it’s effectively a parlor trick, and it apparently only works in parlors lined with a one of a small set of metals. But Henderson, who co-founded the hoverboard’s parent company Arx Pax with his wife Jill, imagines the technology that’s inside it could become a solution for keeping buildings from getting destroyed in floods and earthquakes by simply lifting them up. They also say that it could serve as a replacement for the systems that currently levitate maglev trains. After two years in stealth mode, Henderson’s 19-person startup, Arx Pax, is ready to start talking about the hoverboard and is making the technology inside of it available to the maker crowd on Kickstarter. Arx Pax is looking to raise $250K for the campaign and will sell the technology for $299 in a 12-pound white box it calls the Hover Engine developer kit. Buyers can take the hover tech outside of the box and put it in anything they want to hover.
The current prototype of the Hendo is the company’s 18th prototype. Clearly the company has worked a lot on it so the version being introduced is quite an advanced one. It will hover about 3cm off the ground carrying up to 140kg for around 15 minutes. It uses a strong magnetic field to repulse a ground-based material and float in the same way large maglev trains. That means that Hendo will only float over floors made of non-ferrous metals such as copper or aluminum; this is no skateboard for flying down to the local supermarket, or around the town square hooked to the back of a pickup truck. At the current stage Hendo might not be able to make a great impact on the market owing to its big disadvantages that a customer can never overlook. Firstly it will cost you an arm and a leg. It will cost $10,000 and secondly the battery only lasts 7 minutes.
