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hoverboard

A hoverboard (or hover board) is a levitating board used for personal transportation in the films Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III. Hoverboards resemble a skateboard without wheels. During the 1990s there were rumors, fueled by director Robert Zemeckis,^[1] that hoverboards were in fact real, but not marketed because they were deemed too dangerous by parents' groups. These rumors have been conclusively debunked.^[1] Some companies hoping to leverage the commercial success of the movies have marketed hovercraft vehicles as hoverboards, but these products have not been shown to replicate the experience depicted in the movies. They have also marketed two-wheeled boards as hoverboards. Subsequent to the movies the hoverboard concept has been reused by many authors in various forms of media in fictional universes not directly related to Back to the Future.

The Guinness World Records recognizes the term hoverboard to include autonomously powered personal levitators. In May 2015, the Romania-born Canadian inventor Catalin Alexandru Duru set a Guinness World Record by travelling a distance of 275.9 m (302 yd) at heights up to 5 m (16 ft) over a lake, on an autonomously powered hoverboard of his own design and construction.

drone

A drone, in a technological context, is an unmanned aircraft. 

Drones are more formally known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Essentially, a drone is a flying robot. The aircraft may be remotely controlled or can fly autonomously through software-controlled flight plans in their embedded systems working in conjunction with GPS.  UAVs have most often been associated with the military but they are also used for search and rescue, surveillance, traffic monitoring, weather monitoring and firefighting, among other things.

More recently, the unmanned aircraft have come into consideration for a number of commercial applications. In late 2013, Amazon announced a plan to use drones for delivery in the not-too-distant future.  Personal drones are also becoming increasingly popular, often for drone-based photography. 

Other applications include drone surveillance anddrone journalism, because the unmanned flying vehicles can often access locations that would be impossible for a human to get to. 

In late 2012 Chris Anderson, Editor-In-Chief of Wired magazine, retired to dedicate himself to his personal drones company, 3D Robotics.  Personal drones are currently a hobbyist’s item most often used for aerial photography, but the market and potential applications are both expected to expand rapidly.

In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is developing regulations for the operation of unmanned aircraft.

John Cherbini, president of 3D Robotics, discusses business and consumer applications of drones:

This was first published in August 2015