Most people have seen the film Back to the Future part II. And if you have, you must’ve realized that October 21, 2015 is the day that Marty visits the future. In the film we see a lot of things that people thought we would have by now, but how accurate were they?

The film, although extremely off with the fashion, was not too bad at predicting a handful of things.

One major thing the film had predicted correctly was hover boards; there are some that have been manufactured by Lexus. As impressive as they are, they aren’t quite as good as the ones in BTTF. The hover boards work, but only over magnets.

Brad Merill of the website “Make Use Of”  stated that “The technology relies on a special quantum effect that occurs between superconductors and magnets, which allow for stable levitation of heavy objects. The effect is known as ‘Quantum Locking.’”

A really cool idea was also proposed in the movie; the concept of self-tying shoes. Now it just so happens that Nike has been working on these shoes and plans to release them in spring of 2016 for the charity organization Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Fox, the star of the Back to the Future trilogy, was actually the first person ever to receive a pair of the Nike Air Mags.

In a press release on the Nike website, Nike, Inc. President and Chief Executive Officer Mark Parker said, “We started creating something for fiction and we turned it into fact, inventing a new technology that will benefit all athletes.”

Some technology people thought we would have like the dog-walker, smart glasses and video chatting were also correctly predicted. The dog walking drone in the movie is much similar to the drones we have available today, although we use them today for a lot of personal and commercial business. (i.e. rescue missions, research, mapping, as explained by the American Civil Liberties Union.) The smart glasses Doc uses seem to be just a bulkier version of Google Glasses. In the film we also see a form of video chatting between old Marty and his boss, which is much like Skype today.

We still don’t have everything they predicted we would from the movie like flying cars or, or course, time travel. While it may be nice to have those advances, it is clear that humanity still has a little while to go before that happens.