The Silicon Valley startup that invited skateboarding legend Tony Hawk to test-fly its new hoverboard last year is now a little closer to its goal of levitating buildings just before an earthquake can shake them.
The Hendo Hoverboard unveiled in October by Los Gatos-based Arx Pax, run by husband-and-wife team Greg and Jill Henderson, was mostly a publicity stunt to attract attention to its founders larger mission of creating structural isolation, or homes and other buildings that can withstand earthquakes or floods by detaching themselves from the ground at just the right moment.
To do that, however, the firm s Magnetic Field Architecture system will need to know when an earthquake is coming. On Thursday, the company said it has integrated the ShakeAlert early-warning software into its technology.
As we wrote last year in the aftermath of the 6.0 Napa earthquake, the ShakeAlert system was able to successfully warn the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory about 10 seconds before it felt the effects of the Napa earthquake. Early-alert systems work by detecting primary waves, or P-waves, which move almost imperceptibly through the earth at almost twice the speed of a quake s destructive S-waves, which shake the ground, my colleague wrote about the warning system developed by researchers at Cal, two other universities and the U.S. Geological Survey.
That could be especially helpful if a very strong quake happens far away, allowing a person many miles from the epicenter enough time to find a safe spot — and, if Arx Pax s technology works — to get a home, wine cellar, server rack, operating table or other precious structure hovering just above the ground before it is damaged.
The company — which filed to patent its technology in 2013 — describes how an earthquake alert could induce a magnetic interaction within a home s foundation, creating a cushion of air between the platform on which a home rests and the larger vessel below it.
Our goal is to eliminate structural movement by pinpointing the exact time an object or building s landing gear should retract and activate the hover engines, said co-founder and CEO Greg Henderson in a statement Thursday.
Of course, even if this kind of structure really does get off the ground, it would be a long time before the technology could lift us from earthquake danger. California had about 13.8 million housing units in 2013, according to the U.S. Census, and nearly all of them were tethered to the Earth.
Above: The Hendo Hoverboard (Photo courtesy Arx Pax)
