3
9 Comments

The Smart Hoverboard, and an Individual Taxi Service - Subscription Model

Imagine this.

You're walking on the pavement heading for work.

You have this watch strapped on you wrist, and as you swipe to an app and touch it, it vibrates and a count down begins. You watch the screen.

You continue to walk. Heading for work.

By the time it reaches 5 seconds and counting down, you hear a distant whoosh.

As the count down drops to the final Zero, there zooms a hoverboard floating in the air, black, with blue led strip lights on the edges.

You climb on, and zoom off into the fresh breezy morning.

What you just experienced was the Hoverboard from the future.

Combined with an Uber or Lyft style taxi service, this can be the next big thing.

How does the company make money? Monthly Subscriptions.


What are your thoughts?

#idea-validation #free-ideas #product-feedback-request #office-hours

  1. 2

    Wohooo! That’s how I’d like to start my morning! Love the idea and the visionary storytelling.

    But, how? Tell me more! 👌

    1. 1

      Your comment got me loling, so thanks for that.

      Well, let's see now...

      "...a hoverboard floating in the air, black, with blue led strip lights on the edges..."

      The hoverboard is not what you imagine it to be. You expected it to be rectangular, but it's more circular, slightly ovalish, more circular. Like a round black shield, slightly ovalish.

      You expected it to be slim, like a piece of plywood, but that's only on the edges. Or rather, towards the edges.

      The center of the hoverboard, gracefully drops down, and is like a blueish bulging drop of water.

      What you don't see, is the single powerful turbine at the very center of this contraption.

      From a side-view, the hoverboard begins slim and slightly starts thickening towards the center, until it gracefully forms the inner turbine's droplet like structure.

      The base of this board is made up of 5 layers.

      The top most, industrial-grade plexiglass.

      The layer beneath the plexiglass is structured with a framework of lightweight metal that holds together high efficiency (22.2% rated) solar panels, that absorb in power rays.

      The layer beneath this layer contain 3 major elements.

      One, the lithium ion batteries belonging to the solar unit.

      Two, a set of cogwheels (in order to stabilize and normalize RPMs), that lead to a circular dynamo wheel system that generates energy, from the RPMs of the primary turbine.

      This energy generated from the circular dynamo attached to the turbine's motor, is stored in a parallel set of lithium ion batteries.

      The next layer below the li-ion batteries, circular dynamo, is a cushioning layer of liquid helium. The liquid helium is hopefully going to cool down the batteries, and also the circuitry that comes below it. Whether it lightens the weight of the board is a question that yet remains to be answered.

      Liquid helium, liquid hydrogen, or thermoelectric cooling. That is the question. Which would I use.

      The layer below the cushion of liquid helium, is pure circuitry, that also contains a navigational system that is based upon open source data sets, that allows for driver-less navigation.

      The layer below this, is made up of a mechanical balancing system, that helps balance the contraption that is over, and around the electric turbine.

      The turbine, at the center of the unit, is able to supply enormous amounts of winds.

      But what's more amazing, is that the wind output is actually controlled by the use of half-mechanical air flow gateways.

      Of course, the majority of air flow is pushed downwards, distributed 3 times the radius of the hoverboard, but the wind is able to be slightly directed to any direction the hoverboard is flying against.

      Imagine this, a flat bottomed "alien spaceship", upside down. That would be somewhat what this blue-ringed hoverboard, would look like.

      From a consumer's perspective, the smartwatch strapped on the wrist of every office worker (subscriber), contains the GPS coordinates of that person, which allows the board to figure out where to go, when called.

      Once called, like smart wheeled luggage, the hoverboard will float besides the person, and "realises" when the person is ready to climb on aboard.

      The hoverboard will then have two main options. To head to a specific destination chosen by the hoverer (person), or be controlled and navigated by the person, to wherever he wants to go.

      The board once paired with the person('s watch), will stay with that person for 10 minutes max, if the person doesn't decide to climb on just yet.

      Once unpaired, the hoverboard will be open for the next caller, and will either shoot-off to that person's GPS destination, or return to a recharge/rest rack located in every major mall in the city.

      And that concludes part of the overview design concept running haywire inside my head.

      PS: @Madamdo, sorry for the long write-up; you asked for it. Lol.

      #tech-questions #product-feedback-request #idea-validation

      1. 1

        Ok, I'm even more impressed. Your technical description reads like a romance novel.
        Reading your description, I could already feel the hover board under my feet and the wind in my hair.

        Want to tell me even more? I am super interested in how exactly does it drive on auto-pilot?

        1. 1

          Okay to answer your question, how does it drive on auto-pilot..

          That I suppose would be the easy part. The reason being that with the industrial revolution happening in the autonomous car industry, there's a lot of data being generated, and released to the public.

          Here are a few of those datasets:
          https://github.com/udacity/self-driving-car
          https://www.nuscenes.org/
          https://bdd-data.berkeley.edu/

          So with the available data, it becomes a mere API call (hopefully) in order to move the hoverboard forward.

          For example, let's say we want the board to go to a specific destination. Let's assume that the destination is already mapped and the route chosen (Google Maps).

          The command given to the hoverboard would thus be something like,
          $ Move Forward 10 metres
          $ Turn Left 90 degrees
          $ Move Forward 5 metres
          etc...

          The artificial intelligence system would be more robust and active however, so when the command is to move forward 10 metres, the AI system will analyse the street, change lanes, slowdown at pedestrian crossings, and so on and so forth.

          I have yet to see the insides of an autopilot code base, as well as understand what APIs the open sourced data sets are providing. This is of course, all, purely hypothetical.

          1. 1

            I am aware of self-driving cars and robots playing soccer, of course ;-)

            Just wanted to know how much thought you have given it, because it does not feel like the easy part to me (having a machine learning and computer science background).

            Not saying at all it’s impossible. For sure not, but given that the vehicle operates in traffic, it’s gonna take more than adding coordinates on maps and using gps.

            Regulations and safety requirements come to my mind. Would be super interested to learn more what’s needed, once you are diving deeper into this area.

            All in all, love your idea and hope you share more of your journey.

            1. 1

              Thank you indeed for sharing your perspective on driver-less navigation.

              I certainly haven't had any experience with working with machine learning algorithms.

              Creating, presenting programmatic data insights, KPIs, reports, etc.. yes, but not with artificial intelligence.

              What got me thinking it would be easier than building the prototype was Chris Urmson's Ted Talk, on "How a driverless car sees the road".

              Not easy building algorithms like that. Lol. But easier than building the prototype. 'cause procuring the turbine, building that circular dynamo (which was pure fiction really) which I don't even know if possible, may be quite a milestone to be reached.

              So according to you, building the driver-less navigation is going to be hard.

              That makes 2 major milestones on this hyper journey.

  2. 1

    Hello...I liked your concept...I would like to preorder my hoverboard now please .

    1. 1

      Oh dear.. Well SuperVillain, I can't wait to see you take to the skies with your green suit. *lol, I know who you are.

      But really, this is after all pure hypothesis with regards to the structure, inner workings, and overview of the system, as well as the business model.

      I'd truly love to build and experience a working prototype of this thing myself. But time constraints is a major concern, due to building and running my other projects.

      What I'd actually like to do is, rather than allow for crowdfunding and all that thing, I'd like to crowd-build this thing instead, and open source the very blueprints of the system.

      I want this to be used across the world, for day to day use, for humanitarian purposes, emergency response purposes, fire-fighting, delivery, for the newspaper boy to zoom about delivering the papers, etc... Just imagine an amazingly beautiful and active world with people zooming right and left.

      So by open sourcing the very blueprints of the system, this will allow the world to crowd-build it.

      Say we host a moving lab or garage in a specific location, and create a "sprint team" that together build one model.

      Somewhere in another part of the world, a second team builds a model.

      Together.

      The data is tied together, the blueprints are shared, there's more advancement, and technological innovation is born.

      Synergy. We just need to bring the team skill-sets together.

      1. 1

        Love the co-build idea. Unfortunately, not having too much time at this moment. 3 years back or 3 years from now, I’d love to help get this baby moving without causing collateral damage.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 15 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments