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A Wickedly Fun One-Wheeler That Rides Like a Hoverboard
• Wired.ComBut riding Onewheel, the new electric board from snowboarder-turned-IDEO-designer Kyle Doerksen, gets me pretty close.
Doerksen grew up carving down the ski slopes of his native Canada, so he spent five years in his garage obsessing over a "street snowboard." To create a floating-on-powder feeling over asphalt, he needed a system that could auto-balance a rider. "That's usually the kind of stuff you want to do when you're trying to point a missile," Doerksen says. So he hired a couple of engineers and came up with a single-tire, skateboard-sized electric vehicle that turns like a snowboard and handles like, well, a hoverboard. It zooms up to 12 mph in the direction the rider leans and contains a smartphone-style ARM processor that crunches gyroscopic data to counteract uneven terrain.