Gadgetory

so this is a Lexus commercial you might wonder why a car company is using the hoverboard in one of its ads is Lexus planning to make hoverboards now no shock it's just another marketing stunt but the hoverboard you see is very real it's actually levitating and you can totally ride it but is it the transportation of the future probably not so for like the last two decades we've been teased with the existence of functional hoverboards Back to the Future Part two gave us a glimpse of what a hoverboard may look like in the year 2015 director Robert Zemeckis further fueled our imaginations by claiming that they used real hoverboards in the film and that the only thing stopping these things from being mass-produced was concerned parent groups but that's not true at all they didn't exist last year Funny or Die trolled the internet with Christopher Lloyd Tony Hawk and random celebrities riding a fake hoverboard called the hover which they swore up and down was true and that was also not real so when Lexus released its first hoverboard teaser earlier this summer I along with the rest of the Internet was super skeptical it looked so real but Lexus out of all companies and then we were invited to see the thing in person the whole thing felt a little bit weird in a beach town about 45 minutes away from Barcelona Lexus built an entire skate park or hover Park if you will that acted as a set for its commercial and yeah this park was built just for the hoverboard which does exactly what you think it hovers off the ground like a proper hoverboard but as I'm sure you've guessed there are some big caveats like the track it needs to run on which is crucial to how the thing works at all inside the board are rows of superconductors a special property of these type 2 superconductors is that when they're cooled down to a critical temperature the exhibit properties that alter and manipulate any magnetic field around them therefore the board must be ridden above a highly engineered track that's carefully embedded with magnets strong enough to hold the board and a rider normally the track is hidden under the hover pod the board must be resting upon a portion of that same track when being cooled with liquid nitrogen which essentially programs it to levitate at a certain height after this process is complete the board can be brought over to the park and will hover above the track at roughly the same height about 4 centimeters this technology isn't actually that new it's a process called flux pinning and we've seen people do some fun things with this on a small scale before but now that it's been applied to a hoverboard what's that actually like to ride it's hard it's not as easy as riding a skateboard where all four wheels are on the ground the magnetic track in the ground lines up vertically with the center of the board so it's kind of like you're on a tightrope and if your balance isn't perfectly distributed on this thing you end up scraping the ground with the undersides of the board it took me like 15 minutes just to glide a few feet so yeah no shot I was going to ride around the park like Marty McFly did and Back to the Future Part 2 luckily though I had the chance to speak with pro skater Ross McGowan the guy featured in the commercial so you've been skating for 15-20 years you say yeah and how long did it take you to get master in a sense where you could ride around the track without scraping yeah I mean after that it's been about five six months I've been trying to save it now I can go down to this straight line and even some corner that scrapes a bit but you can write yourself it's quick enough so you don't fall off you can feel it under your feet feel that sweet spot yeah yeah just the feeling of some invisible air rail thing is what it feels like to me so riding the hoverboard is very difficult and besides that another major problem with this thing is that it needs to be constantly cooled with liquid nitrogen and when it was as hot as it was outside that day in Spain we got ten or fifteen minutes on the board before it had to be refilled a process itself that takes another ten or fifteen minutes at this point I gotta wonder why this thing even exists the Lexus hoverboard isn't actually a product it's just a special effect in a car commercial it's part of a series Lexus refers to as amazing in motion the hover bike is a result of years of research and development we combined the freedom of a helicopter with the simplicity of a motorcycle to create the world's first hover bike developing a hover bike is expensive and challenging and we need your support to make this a reality the hover bike flies like a helicopter however it is rugged and easy to use it represents a whole new way to fly we created a 1/3 scale hover bike drone to test a new quad aerodynamic concept how drone will allow you to see and feel just how it will be to fly the full-scale hover bike and will help with raising the funds needed to bring the hover bike to market we have moved to a proven quadcopter design and this is what our second-generation hover bike looks like trains should be friendly and approachable l drone has ducks around the propellers that protect bystanders from the blade tips and allows us to safely operate near the vehicle we designed a large payload Bay that can be easily adapted for different uses a real multi-purpose tool we felt it important to keep turns fun safe and accessible to as many people as possible I like other most doctors are spikes down to a third of its size and be easily transported in a custom multi-use bag we don't think the world senior just how useful drones of all shapes and sizes can actually be the Ducks come embedded with LED lights for brilliant nighttime fly we and our large community of supporters around the world are really passionate up the idea of cheap safe airborne transportation with your help to back this project we can continue to develop the world's first flying motor 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