What will it be like to be a Hyperloop passenger?

At this year's digital SXSW conference, Virgin Hyperloop held a panel to discuss it's plans for the next-gen transport system. For those who haven't been keeping up, the hyperloop idea is to use vacuum-sealed tubes to transport pods at up to hundreds of miles an hour with no air resistance. But what will these pods actually look like, and what would it be like to actually be a hyperloop passenger?

Video Transcript

DANIEL COOPER: It's been eight years since the word Hyperloop entered the public consciousness having arrived here straight from the back of a '50s scifi novel. Vacuum tubes stretching between cities with pods shuttling passengers at up to 650 miles per hour sounds like a fantasy. But in fact, several companies are already working to make this a reality in our lifetime.

Now, Virgin Hyperloop is one such company. One that in November 2020 was able to run the first crude Hyperloop test in Nevada. It turned up at this year's virtual South by Southwest Conference to talk about the future of its passenger journeys.

Earlier this year, it released a concept video exploring how its stations would be built with a series of piers for people to access individual pods. Once on board, these pods would join together with others to form trains which then zoom through the vacuum tubes at high speed. John Barratt is the CEO of Teague, a design firm which has been working with Boeing to create aircraft cabins since 1946.

His team was involved with the creation of the new Hyperloop concept cabin. And while this cramped pod which is capable of seating 17 people at a time doesn't look anything like Virgin's upper class airline cabin, it certainly feels very similar.

JOHN BARRATT: So I think we see so often in transportation or frankly any form of future, even the future of future vision, there's a great tendency for designers to go all tron like with the interiors or Star Wars. And we didn't want to do that with this interior. We felt that remember we're trying to build trust in a brand new form of mobility that can travel up to 1,000 kilometers an hour in an unusual environment.

So we felt that absolutely the wrong thing to do would be to create Star Wars interior for another vision of the future. So we wanted to have an interior that was welcoming. Again, more akin to hospitality than transportation.

DANIEL COOPER: Joel Beckerman who is the founder of Man Made Music said that another element of the design was to create a new sonic landscape because after all there is no sound in a vacuum. So his mission was to create something entirely new.

JOEL BECKERMAN: It's really interesting when you think about the history of transportation. If those sounds have always been foisted upon us, combustion engines sound a certain way, horse drawn carriages sound a certain way. With Hyperloop it's really the first opportunity I think in transportation to actually create sounds that don't exist in the actual experience, but are there specifically to create better experiences for people.

DANIEL COOPER: Sara Lucien is Virgin Hyperloop's director of passenger experience. And late last year was actually one of the first two people to ride on that crude Hyperloop mission. She said that despite the small size of the pod, her team wanted to bring a feeling of space and a feeling of nature inside.

SARA LUCIAN: Whether you go up or you go down, there's a certain transparency of materials and a lot of windows that allow the light to filter in. And we continue that design phrase with the skylight inside of the pod. Now that's a false skylight. It's simulates natural light, but hope is to reduce the perceived waiting time and to give people a sense of connection to the outside world, which I think is so often missing.

DANIEL COOPER: For instance, do you see that strip running on the door there? That's not artwork, that's real moss. Both Lucien and Barratt added that there was a tension for these small capsules to be inviting and accessible while still needing to get paying customers inside. Each pod only has a theoretical limit of 28 people and it will require a lot of creative engineering for the Hyperloop to reach the same capacity as a railway.

Don't forget, the point here is to swallow all of the travel between two major cities, not just be a plaything for time pull one percenters.

JOHN BARRATT: If we believe access to affordable mobility is a human right, let's embrace that. Let's let's go for it. Let's define this new Hyperloop as a system that is more accessible. We know that 15% of the world's population has some form of disability or others. There's so much more we could be doing than that to me if we explore higher passenger headcounts in the pods, but do it in a respectful manner unlike we've seen in other forms of transportation.

DANIEL COOPER: Fundamentally these conversations are important to have and it's another major step on the road to us getting a working Hyperloop, but it's still going to be plenty of time before we actually get to ride in one if it ever actually arrives.