I tried the Swagway electric skateboard and didn't die

To be fair, “cool camera movements” is pretty much the only useful use* I can think of for those things. I don’t think it’s quite smooth enough yet for professional purposes, though.

*Knocking down sports celebrities aside.

Edit. “AAAAAH! Mamma mia.” So good.

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afaik no hand yet - it’s a modular design, body trunk and arm modules are working prototypes, a leg module is planned.

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I wonder if segway has any patents that could conflict here.

Whooa…

I dunno, its no track and (six axis?) Steady cam, but that looks hella smooth. For what, three grand you can now get the camera, rig, and board that would have cost a million bucks 20 years ago.

Very cool video.

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You may be right. It’s not quite $3000 for the whole thing since the DJI Ronin (or similar) stabilizer gimbal alone costs around $2000. But it’s getting there.

Indeed they do.

Which shows one of the problems with patents. Segway could have made a small, portable and convenient consumer product like this instead of making something bulky and suitable only for tour groups of would-be goslings and mall cops, but they didn’t, and neither could anybody else, because patents. Until a bunch of Chinese companies just ignored patent law and made them anyways.

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I’ll certainly accept that. Buy even 2k for an okay gimbal, 1k for an okay camera and lens, and 1k for the board is pretty damn cool.

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No kidding. I was just in Palm Springs with my husband and we saw some guy riding his in the lobby and bar area of the Renaissance Hotel. Between him and the family of six kids tearing ass in the same vicinity, I felt sorry for the food and cocktail servers trying to carry around trays of breakable items.

The next day we saw another guy riding one on the sidewalk and he seemed very respectful of other pedestrians. His speed wasn’t much more than the walkers and I enjoyed watching him (and envied him a little).

I think it’s ridiculous to put restrictions on these electric skateboards when used outside. But it’s pretty selfish to ride them indoors at a hotel.

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Just listened to a nice podcast subject on that very topic. Recommended.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/27/457404184/episode-666-the-hoverboard-life

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Hoverboard already means something. FFS, call it something else.

Oh yes. Funny how it’s probably the first fad of this scale that’s so decentralized it doesn’t even have a single agreed-upon name you can Google effectively.

I doubt if any fad names are ever actually agreed upon, it’s not like anybody is asked to vote for them.

My usual reduction of choice tends to be: “It is what it does.”

So literal. Technically correct, of course.

One “votes” for the name by using it.

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I know! Somebody on FB the other day was asking where they could get a hoverboard… My immediate thought was “nowhere”, but then I found out that it was referring to these stupid things.

How is this basic question from four days ago still unanswered? @boingboing

I suspect the answer is that nobody who can respond to it really monitors discussions on @boingboing account associated stories unless someone goes out of their way to bring it to their attention.

The self-balancing, but human operated platform rolled over a foot of the sliding camera rig. Talk about first-world problems. A self-guided camera-bot would have probably avoided such a mistake.

Joshi-kosei osanpo taken to the next level.

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