"Hover Doors" put frictionless mag-lev in your living room

Your roller doors might be smooth, but they'll never be this smooth. Californian company Hover Doors uses permanent magnets to float heavy sliding doors as if they're mag-lev monorails, for super-quiet, minimal-effort opening and closing.

The company says this helps cut down on all that troublesome roller door maintenance we're all losing hours to every day. It also says the tech is a world-first, although other mag-lev doors have been around a little while from companies like Olide. The key difference is the permanent magnets, which keep the doors suspended at all times and are guaranteed for life; anything relying on electromagnets will draw power as long as the door's hovering, and will presumably drop the door dead on its rail in a power outage. Your floor's fire warden won't be a fan of that.

Hover Doors says it'll make these things up to the size of patio or conference room doors, so there might be a fair whack of rare earth elements involved in the rails and hangers, and that might be reflected in the price. They'll hang glass, wood, or whatever else you want to make a door from, and you can either fit a lower rail to block out wind and water, or float the things over the floor if you're feeling particularly confident no clown's going to push on them and snap them off.

They'll do double doors, barn doors, pocket doors or office doors. They''ll do waterproof shower doors, and automatic doors of all flavors. Little soft-close mechanisms are included to help stop you smashing anything from applying the amount of force you'd generally apply to a slider.

Hover Door claims these things are silent, but amusingly removes sound from most of its YouTube videos and puts music and narration over the rest. Australian company Talbot Auto Doors – which uses an electromagnetic system – also claims its doors are silent, but in its own videos, this is pretty clearly not the case. So maybe it's a matter of what kind of guide you stick at the bottom.

Check out a video below.

Source: Hover Door