Emily Miller- REAL Hoverboards

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/20/tech/future-of-adventure-flying-hoverboards/index.html

The Christmas fad may be tiring as safety concerns rise. Wheeled hoverboards have a history of exploding and becoming banned by airlines. But there's a new hoverboard that ACTUALLY fulfills the meaning of the word "hoverboard" and restores excitement in Back to the Future fans. Philippe Maalouf from Omni Hoverboards revealed that his team is working on one that really flies. Last summer, an early version of the hoverboard broke a Guiness record, flying 905 feet in the air.
The innovative part about this hoverboard, Maalouf claims, is that you feel like you're the one flying. In most other flying vehicles, you feel like "you're on the back of a dragon". He even thinks that someday people may be able to commute to work on them.

The problem right now is power. Omni Hoverboards is thinking of using gasoline-fueled engines. But that means that the retail price will be over $25,000. Meanwhile, another company called Arx Pax is using "Magnetic Field Architecture" to create a hoverboard with the same infrastructure, but hovers by magnetic levitation. This means that it generates a magnetic field that creates electrical currents in the surface. Arx Pax's hoverboard is theoretically more efficient than Omni's, but would be harder to execute.

While the idea of a hoverboard, and even more so a flying hoverboard, poses many safety hazards, I think that we're just seeing the beginning stages of it. If these machines are profitable, they will be perfected over time. Maybe by the ends of our lives, people will be able to use flying hoverboards to travel safely from one destination to another.