Last fall, a company called Arx Pax raised over $500,000 Kickstarter dollars on its way to building Hendo, a hulking hoverboard that really did lift its riders a few inches above the ground. This year’s update, Hendo 2.0, will offer a smoother design and better controls. It also, though, points to a company whose ambitions are as future-forward as the Hyperloop itself.

First, the hoverboard. Its official unveiling will be October 21, a date familiar to Back to the Future fans as the exact future Marty McFly travels to in the acclaimed first sequel. That’s mostly for show, though; Arx Pax is sharing plenty of details about the Hendo 2.0’s enhancements in advance of unveiling the finished product. In fact, many of its improvements are design-related.

“One of the things we realized was that with our first generation hoverboard we made a large deck,” explains Arx Pax co-founder and CEO Greg Henderson. “That gave people the opportunity to put their feet in the wrong place,” which in turn resulted in several hoverboard rides that felt quite a bit more wobbly than the sci-fi future many imagined.

One internal critic of the previous board’s design? Tony Hawk, whom the company had enlisted to help promote last year’s Hendo effort. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that this new hoverboard draws quite a bit more inspiration from a skateboard than last year’s Tron-like foot-zeppelin.

The Hendo 2.0 hoverboard is mostly just a sideshow. It's a proof of concept for where Arx Pax's hover engines really belong: the Hyperloop.

“We’re using visual cues to make it operate as much like a skateboard as we can,” says Henderson of Hendo 2.0. “We have a slightly longer version, a 36-inch board that’s about 10-inches wide, and it’s got the front and rear kick tails. You’re able to use those to more efficiently shift your weight around,” similarly to how you might on an analog deck. The Hendo 2.0 also employs traditional skateboard trucks—the part that connects the wheels and bearings to the deck, although in this case instead of wheels you’ve got electromagnetic repulsion—to let riders customize the experience to their liking.

“If you want to turn right on a skateboard, you lean to your right, and the trucks rotate slightly. And that little bit of rotation changes our force vectors,” Henderson explains. “Skateboarders understand how trucks work, so essentially our Kickstarter backers will be able to modify them and change the trucks to their liking for harder or softer turning radiuses.” Those trucks also, importantly, provide traction, to keep riders from sliding all over the place.

That certainly sounds, at least, like a major improvement over the original Hendo, which tended fly around like, in one reviewer’s words, “a giant air hockey puck.” The battery life is better, too, though it’s a low bar; last year’s Hendo only lasted a few minutes before petering out.

Henderson envisions hoverboards someday occupying the same strata of American Pastimes as, say an electric GoKart course. Or better still, a multi-use, X-Games style set-up. “A hoverboard park franchiser would install a park,” he says of one potential business model. “You’d have a layer of conductive material, but it’d still be functional for BMX bikes and skateboards.”

If you’re wondering what that might look like, Lexus was kind enough to provide an example this summer. Its Slide hoverboard demonstration took place at a specially built park almost exactly in the manner Henderson describes. The Slide and Hendo take slightly different approaches, but a similar set-up would work just fine. In fact, Henderson says he’s already registered commercial interest from a team in New Zealand.

What may be most interesting about Hendo 2.0, though, is that like its predecessor, it’s mostly just a sideshow. It’s a proof of concept for where Henderson thinks Arx Pax’s hover engines really belong: the Hyperloop.

Hoverloop

Last year, Henderson used Hendo to draw attention to his company’s underlying technology, patents that could enable everything from earthquake-resistant building foundations to, say, super-villain weapons.

This year, that list expands to one very specific—though still far-flung—target. Henderson’s a strong believer in the Hyperloop, and an even stronger believer that Arx Pax has the technology to make it work.

“When you consider the ideal showcase for the capabilities of our hover engines, it’s the Hyperloop,” Henderson says. “We’re able to provide propulsion, control, levitation, braking, and guidance in one system, as opposed to other systems of either mag lev or air bearings, which require different systems for all those different components.”

Henderson points out that Japan’s mag lev trains, while fast and reliable, are also terrifically expensive to build, in part because it’s too difficult to bank them around mountains. Instead, you need to dig tunnels through them. Hypothetically, Arx Pax’s hover engines would experience no such limitations.

That hasn’t been proven out yet on a large scale. And even if it had been, there’s no guarantee that Elon Musk’s Hoverloop dreams will ever actually manifest. There’s reason enough not to be dismissive out of hand, though, either of hover engines or the Hoverloop itself. The latter recently entered into an agreement with a leading global engineering design firm, and an open competition to produce viable, half-scale Hyperloop pods remains on schedule for next summer.

Arx Pax, meanwhile, this week successfully demonstrated its technology in a Hyperloop environment, albeit on a 1/12 scale:

SpaceX has also approved Arx Pax’s Magnetic Field Architecture for use in the competition, meaning it could potentially show up in any number of proofs-of-concept. Henderson, not surprisingly, is convinced it will also be what powers the final design.

That’s all years away, though, if it even happens at all. There are plenty of capable technologies competing for Hyperloop glory alongside hover engines, and plenty of technological issues that could sideline the whole project. For now, there’s just a hoverboard. A sentence that may be the best indication of all of just how far in the future we’re living.