Lexus Unveils SLIDE Back To The Future II Styled Hover Board In Teaser Trailer

This week, Lexus showed us a short teaser video for the SLIDE. What those watching the video will see isn't a car, but the type of hover board many of us have dreamed about since Back to the Future II. While we didn't get to see it in action, we saw an actual board levitating a few inches off the ground. It's crazy to think how far we've gone.

You can watch the video right here if you're interesting in this fantastic technological feat.

The power behind the SLIDE is magnets. The magnets combine with superconductors to repel the force of gravity and lift the object from the ground. This is similar to the Hendo hover board on Kickstarter except that one doesn't use a superconductor in the way the Lexus does.

Eric Palm, the Deputy Laboratory Director at FSU's National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, explains the Superconductor in Wired.

"With a superconductor you don't need to have an oscillating magnetic field [like Hendo's]," Palm says. "Instead you have something called the Meissner effect, which essentially says that when you take a magnetic field near the superconductor, it induces current in that superconductor, and creates essentially an image magnetic field on the other side of the superconductor. You create current, but since it's a superconductor, the currents don't die away."

Those who saw the videos also saw the smoke coming out of the board. The smoke is simply liquid nitrogen cooling the superconductors below their transition temperature. The liquid nitrogen inside it is -321 degrees Fahrenheit.

Anyone who is expecting Lexus to mass-produce the SLIDE will be let down because the company doesn't plan on doing that. They say the video is a part of a bigger marketing plan (one that, sadly, is for a car -- and not a floating one). The slide isn't even theirs. Lexus worked with an outside company to get it done as part of their "Amazing in Motion" series.