When you call your motorized skateboard the Board of Awesomeness, it takes some confidence. But rigging a tablet computer and a Microsoft Kinect to control the motorized skateboard is undeniably pretty awesome.
The designers at Chaotic Moon Labs, whose trademark slogan is "We're Smarter Than You" probably don't need our reassurance.
We went down to their design studios, or as they call it, their "fortified zombie-proof bunker" to give the board a ride.
The Board of Awesomeness actually has a sibling called the Board of Imagination, which is controlled by your mind, via an EMOTIV brain wave helmet. The helmet reads your mind and when you think go, it goes, and when you think stop, it stops.
Unfortunately, mere hours before we got there the helmet broke when those aforementioned zombies tried to get into the bunker and broke the EMOTIV helmet. At least that's how they explained it to us.
There wasn't a soldering gun in the state of Texas with the capability to fix it. So with one board down it was Awesomeness's time to shine.
And while a brain controlled skateboard sounds pretty fun, it's fitting that we're featuring a Kinect controlled skateboard on This Could Be Big, because if there was a device that could go viral, it's the Kinect.
The $150 hands free controller that came out in 2010 has taken on a life of its own. Even Microsoft, which was initially unhappy with their device being repurposed has grown accepting. People have taken the controller and hacked it to steer a quadracopter, built a medical body scanner, even attach it to a grocery cart that meets you at the door.
Or in this case, an off-road skateboard that goes 35mph. Let's see how it works.