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Hoverballs Are Here to Bring Quidditch to Life

Flying robot balls have arrived—let the anti-gravity games begin.
Image: Rekimoto Lab

The ball games humans have been playing for centuries are designed around a few basic laws of physics: What goes up, comes down. We know about how fast a baseball flies through the air when it leaves the pitcher's hand, and we know it's going to fall back down to the ground if no one catches it. But what if there was a ball that could float through the air on its own terms? It'd force a rethink of the basic assumptions that govern our sports. It'd open the door for new sports.

That's what Jun Rekimoto expects to happen. He's the engineer who developed the Hoverball, a drone-powered flying ball that can float through the air at any speed in any direction, and even dodge players. Yes, Harry Potter fans, like a real-life snitch.

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The Hoverball is simply a micro-quadcopter embedded inside a spherical plastic frame. For now, it's remote-controlled, but in the future its path and speed could be pre-programmed to give it more autonomy.

The gizmo was developed at the University of Tokyo by a team of researchers led by Rekimoto, whom you may remember as the guy who made objects levitate using sound waves. The research was presented at the Augmented Human conference in Japan earlier this month.

Researchers believe that the Hoverball technology, once perfected, could usher in a new wave of augmented sports. Throw in a couple jetpacks and we could have a real-life game of Quidditch. Or sports designers could dream up brand new, anti-gravity-inspired ball games.

What’s more likely, in the near future at least, is that a flying robot balls will be used to make our current sports games accessible to more people. You could slow down the speed a tennis ball bounces off the racket to make it easier to hit for young kids learning how to play, or elderly people who can't keep up with the game at normal speed. You could even program the machine to move more slowly for certain players, to level the playing field.

“With this technology, physical dynamics of a ball can be re-programmed by sports designers, and new ball-playing vocabularies, such as hovering, anti-gravity, proximity, or remote manipulation, can be introduced to extend the way people interact with balls,' the researchers wrote.

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The various ways the Hoverall could interact with players. Image: Rekimoto Lab

Rekimoto and Co. also see the Hoverball technology being used for sports rehabilitation. We’ve seen examples of hacking gravity for physical therapy or training before. After he tore his Achilles tendon last year, Kobe Bryant ran on an anti-gravity treadmill to build strength back up. And in Singapore, athletes are using “zero-gravity” flotation tanks to train and recover from injuries.

The Hoverball, at this point, is a pretty solid proof of concept, but it's going to need some major improvements to be anything beyond that. For one, engineers will have to extend the length of time it can stay afloat, which right now is only about five minutes. It'll also need to be more autonomous and not rely on a human controller. And last, it's going to have to be much more durable, something researchers are currently working on.

Before this machine can revolutionize sports, it's going to have be able to take a beating. Just as well—the flying broom is probably still years off.