"While one day we expect to have hoverboards that can effortlessly float over any medium (even water!), our current technology requires special types of surfaces."

so basically, they can hover something over a "special" surface, which is not that impressive

From the article: "Currently, this surface needs to be a non-ferromagnetic conductor."

So the "special" surface needs to be anything that conducts electricity but is not magnetic, which is a pretty broad category. https://sg.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201202290514... has quite a long list.

The images with the lego suggests that they're using copper, which is right at the top of that list for conductivity, but 7 orders of magnitude weaker is plain old sea water, so maybe hendo is not entirely joking about the hovering on water thing ;)

if i push on myself, that doesn't generate lift.. can someone let me know if this statement has any scientific possiblity?

"a special magnetic field which literally pushes against itself, generating the lift which levitates our board off the ground."

I'm trying to figure out how this works - so it induces a magnetic field in a proper surface?