Hoverboards a reality in future ?

The dream of working hoverboards seems to have been achieved, and Back to the Future fans may soon be able to emulate Marty McFly's antics.

On the 18 September 2014 D. Gregory Henderson, for Arx Pax LLC, both of San Jose, California (same state as McFly, almost inevitably) had published a US patent application, Magnetic levitation of a stationary or moving object. A week later a World patent application with the same title, WO2014/149626, was published. It is 73 pages long, of which 20 pages are drawings. The final pages cite relevant prior art, and they only found "A" citations -- background, unlikely to invalidate the application. Taken from the US document, there is for example this spectacular drawing:

Here are three others.

The World patent summary states "In one embodiment, the moving magnetic field can be generated by a rotor with arrangement of permanent magnets which is driven by a motor. In operation, the rotor can be spun up from rest to above a threshold velocity, which causes the magnetic lifting device to rise up from the conductive substrate, hover in place in free flight and move from location to location. In free flight, the magnetic lifting device can be configured to carry a payload, such as a person."

Wired has a piece by Rhett Allain called The physics of the Hendo Hoverboard.

Arx Pax themselves seem to be a bit of a mystery. Their emblem is a dove between olive branches, and their mission statement is to be "a revolutionary technology company with the sole purpose of innovating solutions to some of the most pressing global problems of our age." I'm not sure I'd regard the problem of levitating a pressing problem, to be honest. How expensive would it be, I wonder ?

Hendo Hover is the name of the website with a rather cool and fun video showing the device in action. Below is the same video, from Youtube.



The same inventor and company had, in July 2014, a US patent granted for Methods and apparatus of building construction resisting earthquake and flood damage. The basic idea is to put buildings on a concrete structure which can float on a "buffer medium". A drawing from it is given below.

I recently wrote on the related Frankie Zapata's Hoverboard by ZR.