Ladies and gentlemen, the world’s first hoverboard is here! Well, that is if you have $10,000 to spare, millions of dollars to pave your city’s streets in copper, and don’t put a high value on stability or safety.

Let me revise that first statement. If you want to experience the joy of friction-free motion in specially tailored environments (copper-lined skate parks, essentially), and have $10,000 to spare, then the world’s first hoverboard is indeed here. It’s called the Hendo — named after its inventor, Greg Henderson — and it uses the same kind of electromagnetic levitation that allows maglev trains to buzz through the countryside at 300 mph. The main caveat is that, as with all forms of magnetic levitation, you need a special surface for the magnets to push against — you can’t just take your maglev train or Hendo hoverboard and levitate over concrete, wood, or water.

The main trick behind the Hendo is a technology that its inventor calls “magnetic field architecture” (MFA). Despite Henderson “patenting the hell out of the idea” there are very few technical details of how MFA actually works. From various interviews, though, it sounds like MFA is essentially a way of focusing a magnetic field. By focusing the field, it theoretically becomes possible to gain the same amount of electromagnetic oomph while using less power — and if you tweak the field carefully, you can also use it for steering and balance, which are two of the biggest difficulties when it comes to maglev.

So far, it sounds like Arx Pax (the company that’s commercializing the tech) has realized the improved efficiency of MFA, but steering and balance is still a work in progress. Both Engadget and The Verge, which were invited to try the hoverboard out, note that the current Hendo prototype can hover, but that’s about it — there’s no propulsion, and not a whole lot of stability. The company is developing a “Whitebox+” prototype that uses MFA for levitation, propulsion, and control, however, and it obviously wants to bring those features to the hoverboard itself — but I can’t see a stated timeline.

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Overall, the key innovation here seems to be energy efficient levitation. Maglev itself isn’t hard — but squeezing the necessary components (usually superconducting magnets) and power requirements into something the size of a hoverboard is tricky. Even with MFA, though, the current Hendo prototype can still only hover for around seven minutes. The cost of MFA appears to be much cheaper than standard superconducting levitation, too — Arx Pax thinks it would cost just $10,000 per meter of MFA track, compared to hundreds of thousands for existing maglev systems.

Ultimately, Henderson and Arx Pax see the Hendo as just a stepping stone towards a world where cheap, efficient magnetic levitation plays more than just a bit part in the high-speed rail industry. Henderson, who is an architect by trade, says he’s spent the last 20 years thinking about ways of making buildings earthquake-proof — and magnetic field architecture is the technology that eventually emerged. In March 2013, he filed for a patent for a system that would magnetically levitate a house off its foundations to resist earthquakes and floods (US patent 8,777,519). “If you can levitate a train that weighs 50,000 kilograms, why not a house?” Henderson told Engadget.

If the MFA tech can be refined, and the costs really are as low as Arx Pax reports, then trains, warehouse bots, hoverboards, cars, and a whole host of other applications might soon be levitationized.

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Before you get too excited about owning a hoverboard, though, this is the part of the story where I sadly bring you crashing back to reality. First, the Hendo is a Kickstarter project (though I suspect it’ll have no problem raising its goal of $250,000). For $300 you can have a Whitebox maglev developer kit; for $10,000, you can have one of the first 10 “production” Hoverboards. Second, for the foreseeable future, magnetic levitation will only work on special surfaces/tracks (specifically, a non-ferromagnetic conductor like copper or aluminium). This caveat — which essentially means you have to build your own copper skatepark before you can enjoy your hoverboard — will not be relaxed any time soon.

If Arx Pax hits its funding goal, it plans to deliver the first Hendo hoverboards at a special event on October 21, 2015 — yes, the day that Marty McFly arrives on in Back to the Future II, and then proceeds to fly around on a hoverboard.

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