UPDATED: Ever since “Back to the Future Part II” debuted in theaters in 1989, we’ve had one nagging question: When are we going to have hoverboards?

Now a Los Gatos company named Arx Pax is demonstrating a working prototype hoverboard called the Hendo, a nod to company co-founders Greg and Jill Henderson. And Arx Pax on Tuesday launched a $250,000 Kickstarter crowd funding campaign that promises to get 10 Hendos into the hands of investors willing to kick in $10,000 each.

But the Hendersons are thinking far beyond just using the technology for the kid’s toy depicted in the popular sci-fi trilogy. They envision using their “magnetic field architecture” to stabilize the foundations of buildings or large pieces of furniture in an earthquake.

In that case, an early quake warning system could automatically activate the hover technology, which could make the object or building safely hover in place above the moving ground.

They believe hovering cars and trains could revolutionize travel using their technology, which the company says focuses electromagnetic forces more efficiently than possible than in the past. By launching a crowdfunding campaign, the Henderson’s are looking to inspire other inventors to license hover technology for uses that would “fix the world.”

“What we’re trying to do is to capture people’s attention because the hoverboard is a proof of concept for demonstrating a technology that can have a lot of really important issues,” CEO Greg Henderson said. “There are ideas that people are floating around, no pun intended, that are really important.”

“We love bringing the first real hoverboard to the world, but there are so many more meaningful, purposeful things (for) this core technology,” Jill Henderson said. “It’s limitless and that’s what we’re excited about.”

We got the chance to ride a Hendo and it’s not built to fly high over sidewalks, skirt shrubs or foil bat-wielding bullies, as you can see from our video above.

Instead, the Hendo hovered about one inch above the floor and a special skateboard-style half pipe built with sheets of copper inside Arx Pax’s warehouse.

The non-ferrous material is a conductive surface that allows the Hendo to hover. The board has four engines that create a magnetic field, which in turn reacts to the conductive surface to create a secondary magnetic field. Each field repels the other, allowing the board to hover.

The blue light below the board doesn’t do anything except make the Hendo glow.

And you’ll notice the Hendo prototype is louder than a leaf blower. Greg Henderson says they’re working on quieter versions.

Right now, each Hendo costs more than $10,000 to build, but Arx Pax is offering 10 of them at that price through Kickstarter, for delivery in October 2015. For $299, Arx Pax will ship a developers kit with one hover engine inside, “which you can take out and use to hover whatever you like,” Greg Henderson said. For $499, developers get the kit and an app for propulsion and control.

Or for $100, you can reserve a five-minute hoverboard ride at Arx Pax or a future hoverboard park. Auto-dry jacket and Nike power-lacing shoes are optional.

It’s still cheaper than the non-working Mattel Hoverboard prop from the movies, which sold at a London auction this week for 26,000 pounds, about $42,000.

In the sequel to 1985’s original “Back to the Future,” the main character Marty McFly gets into Doc Brown’s DeLorean time machine to travel 30 years into the future – to 2015, one year from now. At one point, Marty borrows a little girl’s pink Mattel hoverboard to escape an enraged descendent of Biff the bully. The hoverboard later helps save the day at the end of “Back to the Future Part III.”

Sure, we know a DeLorean time machine is probably far-fetched, but this is 2014. Science ought to be able to come up with a real hoverboard – not to mention a transporter from “Star Trek” – by now. People have been wishing so much for a hoverboard that they apparently believed this YouTube video was real (it was a hoax by the website Funny or Die, but still has been viewed 14 million times):

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