No, really. With an ish.
That’s a grab from a video Re/code shot and its accompanying article explains:
I visited the tiny, cluttered headquarters of Arx Pax [near Los Gatos, California] last Wednesday. In fact, I felt morally and professionally compelled to after reading the subject line of an email early last week: “Sneak Peak: Working Hover Technology.”
My mind immediately leaped to the elaborate hoax that Funny or Die pulled off earlier this year, when a video purportedly showing skate legend Tony Hawk riding the “HUVr” product went viral. But I was assured that, in this case, there were literally no strings attached — and not only could I see the hoverboard in person, I could ride the thing.
So let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: Yes, it works. But with a very, very big caveat.
Unlike the hoverboard that Marty McFly steered around the town square of the fictional Hill Valley in “Back to the Future II,” this one can’t just float above any old solid surface.
It’s like a MagLev train: magnets in the hoverboard are repelled by magnets in the surface underneath it. There aren’t a whole lot of surfaces with magnets in: that’s the full and complete ish part of the story. But the Kickstarter is not for a finished Hoverboard per se, it’s for the HENDO Hover Engine developer it. You get the tech, you come up with a way to use it. So that’s a big ish but Re/code’s video has an impressive example of it in use with a small skateboard course and a hoverboard that looks like the Pitbull one from Back to the Future Part II.
