"This is the best man wave ever made. For sure. No doubt about it." ~ Kelly Slater

It's a huge statement to make, and luckily for Kelly Slater, his new wave pool might just live up to it. For those of you who missed the promo footage released last week, check out the video below to watch a perfectly peeling, barreling wave that runs along an unknown body of water, somewhere in the world. It's head high during a bottom turn, just big enough to tuck into the barrel, and for a man-made wave - it's fast. Fast enough to pop an aerial, which is the golden handshake to all the critics who said it wasn't possible.

The future of surfing has arrived, and it's done so not with palm trees and white sand, but with murky brown water and frigid temperatures. It took 10 years, and millions of dollars spent by Kelly Slater, but on a cold and misty morning somewhere in the middle of nowhere. He got to surf it, and in doing so, took the metaphorical drop that artificial wave pools needed to receive funding from investors world wide.

Looking back at the past 30 years of wave creation, the level has come in leaps and bounds. It began in enest back in 1985, when Pennsylvania's Wildwater Kingdom hosted the World Inland Surfing Championships. It was awful, and all but sealed the fate of artificial surfing for the next decade until the Flowrider. That too, wasn't great for surfing, because the shallow jet of water was more akin to skimboarding than anything else, while aerials were possible and competition was fierce, the Flowrider remained the niche-at-best cousin to surfing.

In 1997, The Sunway Lagoon opened in Malaysia. It was here that an artificial wave scored its first real cover shot, albeit one that required a jet ski tow in! Producing one wave every 3 minutes, the 20 per hour wave count wasn't really enough to bring in thousands of surfers, and the wave was slow, lacked power and relatively short. Since the Sunway Lagoon however, artificial surfing has been looming on the horizon, waiting for technology to catch it. There was the Ocean Dome in Japan, the Typhoon Lagoon in Florida, Siam Park in the Canary Islands and finally, the Wadi Wave Pool in Abu Dhabi. All improvements, all mocked by 'real' surfers, and all costing millions. Then, there was the Wave Garden in August this year. It opened with a huge Red Bull sponsored event, pre sold hour upon hour of surf passes and took the worlds media by storm. Before it broke. Now it's still closed, and the 'real' surfers are saying 'We told you so'.

To be fair to the 'real' surfers, they are saying the same thing about the Kelly pool. But judging by the wave on display in the clip below, and the recent announcement from Webber that his pool is even better. 2016 could just be the year that technology and funding catches up with artificial wave pools, and the future of surfing is born…