Your childhood dreams will just have to wait.
Earlier this week a pair of exciting videos claiming to show working hoverboards hit the web — courtesy of a company named HUVr — and immediately spread like wildfire. The convincing footage indeed featured people on hoverboards, including celebrities like Terrell Owens, Tony Hawk, Moby, and even Christopher Lloyd. Adding to the starpower, HUVr claimed Mark Cuban as a backer.
But the collective internet remained understandably skeptical. Video sleuths immediately began breaking the footage down, saying they saw cables, crane rigs, shadows, and other giveaways. We gave our article the dubious headline, “Who Is The Diabolical Villain Behind These New Hoverboard Videos From HUVr?”
It turns out proof that the videos were a hoax could be found by doing a little digging outside the footage. As CNET reports:
On the online portfolio site of Lauren Biedenharn … the most recent line of her resume reads, “Commercial: Back to the Future HUVR BOARDS.” Her employer and the producer of said commercial: comedy video Web site Funny Or Die.
Biederharn has since removed the line from her resume, implying plenty of guilt (and pants-sh*tting on her part, no doubt, for blowing everyone’s cover). A cached copy of her portfolio is here.
(More non-video proof that this is all a big prank: The legal terms on HUVr’s website contain plenty of silliness — “we aren’t responsible for anything whatsoever” — and HUVr’s “lead engineer” is an actor named Nelson Cheng.)
So we know this is a ruse, and we know Will Ferrell’s comedy website is behind it. Now it’s just a matter of WHY they did it. Is it a viral campaign for something exciting like Back to the Future 4? A promotion for some other technological breakthrough? Or just a simple, mean-spirited ploy meant to toy with our emotions?