• Question: HOW WOULD A HOVERBOARD WORK, ARE WE CLOSE TO DISCOVERING IT,HOW WOULD IT WORK?

    Asked by 859frcc45 to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 18 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      @859frcc45 I’m guessing air, like a hovercraft, or electromagnetic repulsion like the one some folk made last year. Trouble with that is that we would need metal roads….

    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      We’ve no idea, I’m afraid! I’d go with magnetic levitation as the most promising route, which is how some trains in Japan work, but as Lidunka says, magnetic levitation would only work on special magnetic roads. We’d need proper antigravity for a hoverboard, and we don’t know how to do that yet!

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      Hoverboards have to push against the force of gravity somehow, and it seems our best bets are generally either magnets (which limit you to specific tracks), an air bubble (loud) or jets of water (wasteful). Maybe we’ll start developing magnetic tracks embedded in the sidewalks, but I think that’d take a level of infrastructure redoing that is unlikely to happen soon.

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