Virgin Hyperloop Unveils Passenger Experience Vision (yahoo.com) 69
Just months after their first passenger testing, Virgin Hyperloop today unveiled its vision for the future hyperloop experience. Yahoo Finance reports: The newly-released concept video takes the viewer step-by-step through a hyperloop journey, from arriving at the portal to boarding the pod. Virgin Hyperloop worked with world-class partners across disparate industries -- including Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) for the portal designs, Teague for the pod designs, SeeThree for the video and animation, and Man Made Music for the score and sonic identity -- to design a comprehensive, multi-sensory passenger experience that surpasses that of any other form of mass transit.
Far from a dystopian future where dark colors, stark lighting, and screens abound, Virgin Hyperloop's counter narrative is a more optimistic view of the future: a greener, smoother, safer, and more pleasant mass transit experience. "We leveraged decades of experience designing how people and things move across various modalities -- taking some of the best aspects from aviation, rail, automotive, and even hospitality to create a new and better passenger experience that is distinct to Virgin Hyperloop," said John Barratt, CEO & President, Teague. "Recessed seat wells provide a greater sense of space, while the raised aisle is a touch of the unexpected and unique. Bands of greenery and wood textures subvert the aesthetic of typical mass transit materials with something optimistic and fresh. All lighting in the pod -- including the unassuming information displays -- are dynamic and adjust based on traveler activity and journey milestones."
"Through proprietary research and a design thinking approach to creating sound and sonic solutions for Virgin Hyperloop, Man Made Music was able to address a myriad of potential challenges for this new mode of transportation, from how to evoke a sense of privacy and space to an enhanced sense of safety and calm," said Joel Beckerman, Founder and Lead Composer at Man Made Music. "We respond to sound quicker than any other sense, so sound actually drives the multi-sensory experiences. The sonic cues of the Virgin Hyperloop identity system serves as a guide for passengers throughout their experience while instilling confidence, safety, and clarity -- you 'feel' it rather than 'hear' it. Just like a great movie score, it tells you the story. We know when we've got it right when you don't notice the sound at all: the interface is humanized in ways that are both fresh and familiar."
Far from a dystopian future where dark colors, stark lighting, and screens abound, Virgin Hyperloop's counter narrative is a more optimistic view of the future: a greener, smoother, safer, and more pleasant mass transit experience. "We leveraged decades of experience designing how people and things move across various modalities -- taking some of the best aspects from aviation, rail, automotive, and even hospitality to create a new and better passenger experience that is distinct to Virgin Hyperloop," said John Barratt, CEO & President, Teague. "Recessed seat wells provide a greater sense of space, while the raised aisle is a touch of the unexpected and unique. Bands of greenery and wood textures subvert the aesthetic of typical mass transit materials with something optimistic and fresh. All lighting in the pod -- including the unassuming information displays -- are dynamic and adjust based on traveler activity and journey milestones."
"Through proprietary research and a design thinking approach to creating sound and sonic solutions for Virgin Hyperloop, Man Made Music was able to address a myriad of potential challenges for this new mode of transportation, from how to evoke a sense of privacy and space to an enhanced sense of safety and calm," said Joel Beckerman, Founder and Lead Composer at Man Made Music. "We respond to sound quicker than any other sense, so sound actually drives the multi-sensory experiences. The sonic cues of the Virgin Hyperloop identity system serves as a guide for passengers throughout their experience while instilling confidence, safety, and clarity -- you 'feel' it rather than 'hear' it. Just like a great movie score, it tells you the story. We know when we've got it right when you don't notice the sound at all: the interface is humanized in ways that are both fresh and familiar."
"Virgin Hyperloop Passenger Experience Vision" (Score:3)
Sounds like a new designer hallucinogenic drug.
Re: "Virgin Hyperloop Passenger Experience Vision" (Score:1)
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The problem with hyper loop is the implementation could be done, were it not for the hype machine. They need to stop teasing investors with experience demos and start solving the engineering challenges ahead. Until then, it will be vapor ware.
You're not kidding. FTA: "Virgin Hyperloop can accelerate the future of mobility on land. The new mode of travel at supersonic speed rethinks transportation and the perception of space, landscape, time, and distance,” said Bjarke Ingels, Founder & Creative Director, BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group. “In this day and age, Virgin Hyperloop taking off from our portals provides holistic, intelligent transportation for a globalized community to travel across vast distances in a safer, cleaner, easier, and
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Anyone for Buzzword Bingo?
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Anyone for Buzzword Bingo?
I'll start. We need to outsource mission critical data mining.
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I for one hope it has an "off" switch.
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Let me guess: there's a valve somewhere outside to re-pressurize the tube?
Anyway, this is all academic: it was very unlikely to happen before the pandemic for a variety of technical and economic reasons, and now it'll never happen for sure. The airlines have had a viable and well-established business for decades and now they're all gutted and near death. That wide-eyed futuristic daydream of a mass-transit system stands no chance if even the fucking airlines can't survive the pandemic.
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The airlines have had a viable and well-established business for decades
Huh? The airlines have been struggling for decades, staying afloat only by merging with others or courtesy of the many bailouts. And some of them went under regardless...
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Huh? The airlines have been struggling for decades, staying afloat only by merging with others or courtesy of the many bailouts. And some of them went under regardless...
Not really though. Some are doing better than others and there's consolidation going on as usual in a mature industry, but most airlines are reasonably profitable outside of like 9/11 and pandemic events.
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The airlines have had a viable and well-established business for decades
Rubbish. All airlines are money pits constantly on the verge of bankruptcy.
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Rubbish. All airlines are money pits constantly on the verge of bankruptcy.
But I suspect, only in the same sense that every movie loses money.
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But it's not like these are hard ques
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It seems like a lot of hassle for something that has few advantages over maglev.
They also don't mention anything about the noise in their video. They will have pumps running continually and pressure waves as the pods travel down the tubes.
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pressure waves in a vacuum?
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It's not a vacuum, it's a partial vacuum. Lower pressure than sealevel but not by that much.
Aside from anything else if it was very low pressure or vacuum you would need a complex and slow airlock system for the pods to enter and leave the stations.
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>It's not a vacuum, it's a partial vacuum. Lower pressure than sealevel but not by that much.
Do you know how much? I can't find numbers, but I would wildly guess that that you'd want to hit at least 10% to be worth the expense of the tubes. Though I suppose the other cars in the tubes would ensure that the air was already moving in the right direction at high speed, so air resistance would be greatly reduced even at higher pressures.
>you would need a complex and slow airlock system for the pods to e
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Found the pressure, sort of, under the rightmost unlabeled hot-spot on the speed animation : https://virginhyperloop.com/ [virginhyperloop.com]
They say equivalent to 200,000 feet. Which looks like is about... 0.17mbar, or about 2/10,000th a standard atmosphere. For most purposes that's pretty frigging close to hard vacuum. Perhaps you're thinking of someone else's hyperloop? A lot of different groups are taking up the idea, and I think I do remember hearing one of them talking about using only slightly reduced pressure.
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>Aside from anything else if it was very low pressure or vacuum you would need a complex and slow airlock system for the pods to enter and leave the stations.
Actually, I just watched the video and stand corrected: in their proposal it appears the cars DO NOT leave the when they enter the, which makes far more sense. Instead they have short airplane-style "passenger bridges" that extend from the inside of the tube and seal against the cars to let passengers on and off. That simplifies things immensely, a
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W.T.F. That should be
the cars DO NOT leave the tube when they enter the station
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Aside from anything else if it was very low pressure or vacuum you would need a complex and slow airlock system for the pods to enter and leave the stations.
From watching the video, it seems like there isn't an airlock system for the pods. It looks like a short "skybridge" like arm seals around the hatch and people enter and exit the pod through that. The pod doesn't need to leave the low pressure zone.
That's what it looks like to me, though I could be wrong. Anyone else see how it works?
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It is like these are hard questions, because they are hard questions. You can't just isolate a section of the tube given that there might be a pod approaching it at 700mph. If you allow for an acceleration of 1g it'll take more than 4km to stop. Furthermore, 1g acceleration is quite extreme since it's essentially the same as if the pod was standing on end. I hope everybody's wearing their seatbelts.
There will not be a commercially successful hyper loop system.
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Hilariously the video shows an open plan pod with no seatbelts at all. In fact they have all sorts of unsecured luggage lying around, including hot beverages.
It's not just the next pod coming either, there will be huge shockwaves in the tunnel. If you try to isolate one section you are going to get reflections unless you have some pretty effective way of dissipating them.
Japan Rail has actually done some work on this for their new maglev tunnels, but that's a far less severe problem.
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>There will be huge shockwaves in the tunnel. If you try to isolate one section you are going to get reflections unless you have some pretty effective way of dissipating them.
I presume you're talking about the air-hammer effect in response to a catastrophic tunnel breach, as a column of air accelerates down the tunnel until it hits a barrier and rapidly builds enough pressure to explode the tube.
The obvious solution is frequent barriers to block the air-column before it builds up significant speed, accom
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Furthermore, 1g acceleration is quite extreme since it's essentially the same as if the pod was standing on end. Starting in an air bus is close to 1G - no one complains.
Many top edge cars can accelerate above 1g.
The problem could be deceleration, acelleration while nicely sested for 20 seconds, most people will enjoy it, if they even notice it. It is the same as you feel lying in your bed.
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Just a vacuum sealed door 3 m in diameter would be a technical challenge as it would need to hold a force of more than 70 tons.
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Not really - pressure doors are pretty much a solved problem. The door itself needs to be either thick or domed enough to transfer the pressure to the door frame, and it closes from the high-pressure side so that the pressure itself holds it tightly closed. Same basic principle as a rubber-disc drain stopper.
The only challenge is making the door and frame strong enough to support the load - but that's a challenge of size, not technical difficulty. And it doesn't even take that much size - Starship's test
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The video looks like a student project, it's not based on any realistic implementation.
The pods are much larger than what are being proposed and the interior is not suitable for the levels of acceleration they will experience. We see phones and hot beverages sat on flat surfaces where the acceleration would fling them off. The pods are very open and spacious, when in reality they will be like train carriages that make maximum use of the available space.
The pods travel extremely close together, too close to
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>The pods are much larger than what are being proposed
Are they? They're certainly bigger than the XP-1 "full-scale" test prototype that was 2.5m wide, but that was a design from 2017 - a lot could have changed since then.
Interestingly - using the shot with a man standing in the aisle it seems as though the car is about 3.5m across, which would make it almost exactly the right diameter to hold a standard cargo shipping container. Which would dramatically increase the potential uses for it.
>The corner
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The video you linked to shows how it they plan it work. A car comes in off the main line while decelerating and would be directed to one of the spots that are parallel with one another. The incoming line connects to all of the spots and they are all connected to the outgoing line. It's like the spots at a train station, except those are usually straight or the end of a line.
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Right, they show that right at the beginning don't they? I suppose they don't actually need 4 acceleration tubes, just one for arrivals and one for departures. Those can split off into four separate "north/south" tubes right before the big curves that join them with the main "highway".
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From 2:00 to 2:06 in the video it shows the layout of the station tracks when the car is coming in from the main line. The lines to and from the main lain are presumably built under the body of water and the station is under a park. There are a bunch of stops for the car all in a row which removes the problem of getting stuck behind another car. (I've also seen this type of system used for buses parking.)
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Yeah - that's kind of the entire point of why I shared the video - hence the "Picture the alternative" bit when discussing NOT doing it that way. I thought you were disagreeing with something.
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But you do know that rails etc. in high speed curves are build on a slope? To compensate centrifugal forces with gravity?
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If only they had rails. I suppose they could try to come up with a way of tilting the car in the tube. It would be a bit of a rollercoaster ride.
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I thought it ran on mag levs? Same principle like rails ...
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It's obvious what happens. You wait until the next one comes along at 700mph and then the passengers in both pods no longer have any worries in the World.
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>They don't seem to cover what happens when, as is inevitable before long, a train breaks down between stations.
I'm not sure if Virgin specifically did - but Musk's original proposal included a very straightforward solution - give the cars an independent slower-speed electric wheels that can roll it to the nearest station if something goes wrong with the primary systems. Sort of like including a built-in tow truck in every car. And in the rare case when that system might also fail - an actual dedicated
Very polished (Score:2)
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We dont need this (Score:1)
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Yeppir! But make the tubes big enough to accommodate a pod that you can drive a tractor-trailer onto, keep the life support, ride it to the next city up to 300 miles away, truck delivers part of his load there, gets back on the tube, goes to the next delivery city, repeats. Very fast, gets trucks off the highways, and people with cars can drive them onto such a system too, and share it with the trucks. Stop sharing space and transmitting diseases, renting cars, parking cars and paying for that, etc.
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Yeppir! But make the tubes big enough to accommodate a pod that you can drive a tractor-trailer onto,
Or, at least, a shipping container.
There's no point transporting the whole truck - it's a lot taller and heavier and will double or triple the construction costs (bigger tube).
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If you transport the whole truck, then it is just driven onto the system for a loading time of less than a minute with no cranes involved, as well as driven off the system in less than a minute, again no cranes involved. A shipping container would have to be loaded onto a truck which would take some time, as well as off the truck at the start. Better to just let the truck driver do his thing and cut way down on the time. As for sitting in the tube, these tubes are or were only 300 miles long max, so t
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A bit of a technicality, but you don't need a crane to transfer a shipping container, a much simpler hoist would do the job: Drive the truck under the hoist, lift off the shipping container, then drive away and drive the cargo-car into the space and lower the container onto it.
Or actually - since these cars are suspended from the ceiling, drive the truck under the car, and use the hoist to transfer it between them. Heck, you could even build the hoist into the car itself if you really wanted to.
Don't over
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Why have the driver stay with the load? It's just wasted time. There should be a different driver at the other end to pick up the load. That way the original driver can go and fetch another load instead of sitting in the tube.
In fact, since speed isn't that critical to most cargo, why not reduce the speed of the pods to the point where you do not need a vacuum tube and thus save huge quantities of cash. It would also make loading and unloading much quicker because you could design the pod to be just a flat
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Wake me when you can go from Berlin center to Paris center by using Zoom, in roughly one hour.
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We need cheap high speed shipping!. Forget passengers. Drop the life support and all the PR sillyness and concentrate on shipping!
Any Hyperloop system would have to be able to carry freight, and in standard 2TEU containers if possible. Once implemented, you would want to have the system carry only freight for the first few years until passenger safety is assured.
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A few years ago (2017 IIRC) someone in Italy proposed a thing called Pipenet - basically small containers traveling at 1500 km/h. Much smaller and cheaper than Hyperloop since it wouldn't accommodate people. I don't know if they are still working on it.
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We are working in this in Germany since nearly 70 years in two universities.
One wants to build a city wide tube grid underground, for parcels (imagine a kind of roof container fir cars holding ski equipment, but put into a tube).
"We respond to sound quicker than any other sense" (Score:1)
More psychobabble, based on feelings, that are apparently more important now than facts ?
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Anyone who's taken Psych 101 has learned about the ruler drop test of reaction time, and this is essentially the consensus view, so they DON'T actually need to give a citation - it's easily googlable.
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If psychology was a science, the answer would be clear.
But psychology is not a science, psychologists do not even attempt to reproduce their results, and psychobabble instead of facts is the result.
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
"There is some evidence to suggest that response to haptic warnings is faster than auditory, which is faster than visual. See the study I've attached by Ng and Chan for this exact comparison. This seems to follow our basic understanding on human information processing that RT for
A Non-Starter On Several Levels (Score:1)
After COVID, people aren't much going to want to get into a big tube with lots of other people. The concept I saw of hyperloop initially was a small vehicle with maybe 1-4 passengers that left the station when you arrived and sat it in. Now this train must travel on a schedule so there will be delays to wait for the scheduled time to leave. What is that, 1/2 hour to the next departure? Why don't I just drive? Also, the max range of each vehicle when I read the proposal years ago was 300 miles becau
I call fake.. (Score:2)
https://youtu.be/-zSWagCyWio?t... [youtu.be] 0:04 large terminus inside a city
https://youtu.be/-zSWagCyWio?t... [youtu.be] 0:09 1 person still has a car
https://youtu.be/-zSWagCyWio?t... [youtu.be] 0:17 this guy's ebike has broken down
https://youtu.be/-zSWagCyWio?t... [youtu.be] 0:20 lots of space, people just hanging out for the awesomeness of the station
https://youtu.be/-zSWagCyWio?t... [youtu.be] 0:27 security way too easy
https://youtu.be/-zSWagCyWio?t... [youtu.be] 0:40 too much space and comfort
https://youtu.be/-zSWagCyWio?t... [youtu.be] 0:42 paper newspaper??
https://youtu.be/- [youtu.be]
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Just get a .50 cal rifle...
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Blow it up? Screw that, a chunk of thermate on a curve will melt a section of track and the whole thing piles up in a gigantic hairsnarl.
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https://youtu.be/-zSWagCyWio?t... [youtu.be] 0:32 "Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL"
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No seatbelts on German ICE at 330 km/h
Raised aisle? (Score:2)
Have these people never heard of handicapped access and the Americans with Disabilities Act? Or trip hazards?
Design challenges (Score:2)
Have they figured out a way to design a lovely, comforting UI around the "multiton projectile carrying people bursting at thousands of miles per hour from a tube and cartwheeling destruction and death across the countryside because no tube snaking across the earthquake-prone fields of SoCal can possibly remain perfectly airtight" challenge?