SpaceX's Hyperloop pod design competition is still a year away. But we're already seeing initial takes on what the futuristic high-speed transportation system could look like. And luxury travelers fear not: even on the Hyperloop, you could travel with your pinky up.
Argo, a design firm, has created its own vision for Hyperloop pods. The concept includes five different types of modular capsules, each similar to a train car. Two of them are pretty boring: a cargo capsule and a vehicle capsule (presumably to carry passengers' Teslas). The rest of them would carry passengers, and Argo's vision borrows heavily from the current class system for air travel.
The concept includes three kinds of compartments: coach, business and luxury. The business section comes with space to work privately, while the luxury executive section seats eight (four people sitting face to face,) and has reclining chairs. That doesn't mean coach is a bad deal: It seats 15 and comes equipped with smaller screens and foldout keyboards.
The "higher-end" capsules would be roomier than a typical flight, and the amenities would be even better. There'd be huge leather seats and curved flatscreen televisions. The luxury capsule has projection displays (they look like glass screens with images projected onto them), while the business capsule would include a motion sensor placed above the display that tracks passengers' eyes and adjusts images to create moving parallax views. The chairs swivel, too.
Since Hyperloop is essentially high-speed travel inside a windowless tube, that doesn't compare favorably to the views from plane or train windows. So Argo's concept is lined with enormous screens on each side that recreate the feeling of looking out a window. The screens show the vehicle moving through a pasture or flying in the air, but it could also make passengers feel like they're traveling through space or underwater.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors as well as SpaceX, proposed the idea back in 2013, but said he had no time to build it himself. The Hyperloop would place people in a vehicle inside a large tube capable at traveling at previously unachievable speeds. Musk tantalized people with dreams of traveling to San Francisco from Los Angeles in just half an hour, and inspired a fleet of companies looking to build a real-life Hyperloop.