Tony Hawk rides a hoverboard ... and this time it's for real

Pro skater Tony Hawk has taken a ride on a real-life hoverboard, months after tricking fans with the release of a fake video.

Hawk took the world’s first hoverboard for a spin and apologised for the prank in March when he duped tech-fans with a video showing him floating on a hoverboard.

“This is real, this is it folks, this is the real hoverboard right here,” he says in the video.

“Forget everything you know.”

Skateboarding journalist Dave Carnie also tried out the new invention and described it in an article published in The Riding Channel as “more than just a skimboard out of control”.

“I had arrived with all kinds of silly ideas of what to do on the hoverboard, but after my first spin on the thing I realised that all of my hover dreams were way too ambitious,” he wrote.

“But I did ride it - although “ride” isn’t quite the right word. It’s more like I stood on it and it just kind of went wherever it wanted.”

Jill and Greg Henderson, the architects behind the Hendo hoverboard, said they were keen to share the technology.

“The hoverboard is a great way of capturing people’s interest and letting them know how this technology works and in a way that they can understand,” Mr Henderson said.

Hawk apologised for the prank published by Funny or Die in March and said he thought it was clear it was a fake.

“I’m the boy who cried hoverboard,” he said.

The hover technology relies on magnets and Carnie said the possibilities were “mind-boggling”.

Unfortunately it's still a far cry from the boards made famous in Back to the Future II - this hoverboard only works on top of non-ferromagnetic surfaces like aluminium.