World's Most Expensive Basketball Court

Outfits like LA Fitness might make some extra money with this sort of thing - renting the court out to up-and-coming serious hoopsters.

The basic idea is this - you have about 10 basketballs that you use for your practice. You shoot and then, you immediately reach for another ball that's right by you and shoot again and keep on going - practise basically. You get the idea. Now, if you have a partner dedicated to helping you, that's fine. But what if you haven't?

Suppose you had a court that had an elastic surface with actuators (and sensors of course) underneath it. So, you can detect where a ball bounced for the first time and, if you're smart enough, based on _how_ it bounced, where it's going to bounce next and modify the surface a bit to steer the ball such that our budding hoopster doesn't need to move much - he focuses on shooting. If you have about 10 balls on the court, the surface really doesn't have to move much at all - meaning that there' plenty of time for you to get the ball back to where it needs to be after it's first bounce.

This could probably go into the first billion-dollar home. That's a new idea in itself - if no one's done it already. Problem would be taxes I guess - the local government would probably be smiling. Best is to do what Dean Kamen did - find an island and make a separate country out of it and build your house there.