Meet the Flyboard - the water-powered hoverboard you never knew you wanted
You might not get one in your local swimming pool
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Your support makes all the difference.It turns out that if you really want to make a hoverboard the key ingredient isn’t anti-gravity or some sort of super-exotic dark matter – it’s just water: lots of water.
Meet the Flyboard, the latest invention from French jet ski champion Franky Zapata. It uses powerful streams of water like a fireman’s hose to let people ride above the waves or even dive underneath the water.
It may sound clumsy but the results are phenomenal – just watch the video above.
The Flyboard is the latest implementation of Zapata’s technology, which uses the motor inside a jet ski (or a seperately sold custom unit) to create a floating powerpack that sucks up water and expells it as jets on which the user can balance and move.
Zapata has previously created jet packs and standing platforms that look like they give the wearer Magneto-style levitation powers, but this is the first time the technology has looked quite so natural to use. The riders really do look like they’re using hover boards.
As you’d expect though, all this comes and price and a basic Flyboard kit costs $5850 (£3440) – excluding buying your own jet ski. Better start finding out where you can rent these instead.
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