Moby,
Tony Hawk, and other celebrities rocket around on the
HUVr Board—a flying board billed as a real world version of the
hoverboard from the
Back to the Future film franchise—in this slickly produced
promo video featuring
Christopher Lloyd who played
Emmett “Doc” Brown in the BTTF film trilogy.
According to HUVr, the board is crafted from “paramagnetic titanium” and is expected to ship in December 2014. Of course, HUVr Board most likely a particularly elaborate viral video stunt.
As far as we’re aware, the current state of technology is still a long way away from creating a compact device that can lift 180 pounds (81 kilos) a few feet off the ground. Humanity’s best efforts to date have consisted of, effectively, small hovercraft (floating on a small cushion of air blown by a large fan) — and a few feeble attempts involving magnetic levitation (maglev; the same concept behind maglev trains, but on a much smaller scale).
The problem with hoverboard technology is power. It takes a huge amount of energy to lift 180 pounds a few feet into the air — and a significant amount to hold that mass there or move it around.
The energy and power density requirements are well beyond what’s capable with lithium-ion batteries. Nuclear fission might just be enough (though the scale and form factor make it unlikely).
Fusion, of course, would work — as would cold fusion, probably. (But neither tech is likely to come to a hoverboard form factor in our lifetime.)
More realistically, a hoverboard might be powered by permanent room-temperature superconducting magnets — but even then, there’s the problem that the magnets must have something to push against. In the case of maglev trains, there are superconducting rails; in the case of a hoverboard… there’s just plain ol’ throughly nonmagnetic concrete.
