We’ve been reporting on the Hyperloop for a while here at Tech Trends. Elon Musk conceived the Hyperloop in 2013 as a revolutionary high-speed ground transport system, and this concept is now being worked on around the globe by the world’s top engineers, architects and designers.As part of this, a yearly competition is held at SpaceX HQ in California among University teams who test out the concepts they have been working on for the previous 12 months.

We’ve been reporting on the Hyperloop for a while here at Tech Trends
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Elon Musk conceived the Hyperloop in 2013 as a revolutionary high-speed ground transport system
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Over the years, we’ve had the chance to meet and talk to several of these teams that have taken upon themselves to bring Elon Musk’s ambitious vision for clean and ultrafast public transport to life, including the previous winners at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands.

Over the years, we’ve had the chance to meet and talk to several of these teams that have taken upon themselves to bring Elon Musk’s ambitious vision for clean and ultrafast public transport to life
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The Dutch team are back competing for the third year now (having won first place in 2017), and their model is the one being showcased in a new immersive Virtual Reality experience of a Hyperloop journey, which takes you from entering the station to travelling in a pod, in a vivid production that gives a glimpse into the future of high-speed transport.

The 2019 SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition will host twenty teams from around the globe competing to achieve the fastest top speed along the fully enclosed 1.25 km test track
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The panoramic VR experience is being unveiled at Elon Musk’s SpaceX headquarters in California, which is this week hosting the 2019 SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition, where twenty teams from around the globe will compete to achieve the fastest top speed along the fully enclosed 1.25 km test track.

The panoramic VR experience is being unveiled at Elon Musk’s SpaceX headquarters in California
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This is the second Hyperloop VR experience that CG specialists (whose clients include Adidas, Honda, Philips and Yamaha) INDG has worked on, previously creating an interactive model and exploding view of TU Delft’s entry to the inaugural SpaceX competition. However, this time they teamed up with AltSpace CGI studio, which – since being founded in 2012, has worked projects including the world’s first fully electric car-racing series Formula E, a first global AI race series Roborace, a leading designer in the superyacht industry Malcolm McKeon Yacht Design, as well as World Touring Car Championships and the G20 international forum.

The goal is not only to secure another win and set a new speed record, but to develop the long-term viability of the Hyperloop project
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Being responsible for the visual and technical aspects of the VR experience, AltSpace was invited to recreate wide-ranging station facilities, the pod’s minimalistic interior and exterior design, as well as panoramic views, infographic screens, and navigational signage.

“Our collaboration with Delft Hyperloop and INDG is grounded on the shared aspiration to work with technologies that advance and expand our lives,” says AltSpace CEO Igor Voloschuk. “We supported their initiative by developing a VR experience that would allow the audience to dive into the world of the future and appreciate forthcoming breakthroughs. We believe the result is a bridge connecting the technologies of an innovative transportation system with the latest developments in real-time graphics.”

Rieneke van Noort, Team Captain of Delft Hyperloop III, stresses that their goal is not only to secure another win and set a new speed record, but to develop the long-term viability of the Hyperloop project. This is where VR, with its ability to convey a true sense of presence and experience, becomes a particularly useful tool: “A part of this is showing the public what it will be like to travel using this new system. Through VR, we want to enable people to experience the Hyperloop in an interactive and immersive way. It is great to see people’s enthusiasm when they walk through the Hyperloop station and board one of the pods.”

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Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. You can follow @alicebonasio on Twitter, connect with her on LinkedIn or subscribe to her Inside VR/AR Newletter for all the latest curated immersive news.

The post Riding the Hyperloop in Virtual Reality appeared first on Tech Trends.

Sometimes tech sounds too good to be true, and that is certainly the case with the Hyperloop: Ultrafast, clean, efficient and convenient. So what’s the catch?

Imagine traveling the length of the United Kingdom—from London to Edinburgh, 400-plus miles—in under an hour. A journey from Los Angeles to San Francisco would take less than 30 minutes (five hours less than the average drive between the two cities). Your journey would be safe and comfortable, your carbon footprint almost non-existent.

Imagine traveling the length of the United Kingdom—from London to Edinburgh, 400-plus miles—in under an hour
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Passengers and cargo would be loaded into a pod, which accelerates gradually via electric propulsion through a low-pressure tube. The pod quickly lifts above the track using magnetic levitation and glides at airline speeds for long distances due to ultra-low aerodynamic drag.

You could board directly from your office in London, shoot down a tunnel to join the main network, and after around 50 minutes traveling at speeds of anything between 600 and 1200 kilometres per hour (roughly 370-745mph) in a vacuum tube, arrive at your meeting in Edinburgh before heading back in the afternoon.

Getting a sense for whether it’s genuinely time to begin taking the Hyperloop seriously in 2018 requires talking to the people living and breathing the development
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Such is the promise of perhaps today’s most buzzed about transportation innovation: the Hyperloop.

Today, of course, this all sounds rather far-fetched, especially to someone used to spending over an hour on the 60-mile commute from London to Cambridge. So what is it exactly about this technology that has some of the world’s most influential businessmen and innovators—from Sir Richard Branson (whose Virgin Group recently acquired LA-based Hyperloop One) and SpaceX/Tesla visionary Elon Musk (who pushed the idea to begin with)—championing it? To borrow from Musk’s other high-profile initiatives, is Hyperloop destined to be another Tesla or will it be more like Mars colonization (something that, if not exactly impossible, is also not happening any time soon)? Could this fail entirely?

Getting a sense for whether it’s genuinely time to begin taking the Hyperloop seriously in 2018 requires talking to the people living and breathing the development. Luckily, there are quite a few people along for that ride these days.

Current Hyperloop hype all started in August 2013 when Musk first challenged startups and students to develop the concept
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Current Hyperloop hype all started in August 2013 when Musk first challenged startups and students to develop the concept, which he described as something like a cross between Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table.

Despite some positive praise since, there are plenty of reasons to remain skeptical. To start, a real-world Hyperloop system would require a large network of vacuum tubes. As sharp turns are impossible, it will be difficult to obtain the space, especially above the ground in densely populated areas. That means the network is most likely to be built underground, and the high cost of tunnelling must also be factored in. It’s not hard to imagine a civic works project that escalates into the billions.

As the Hyperloop levitates in a vacuum environment, there is little resistance. Therefore, when the pod reaches speed, hardly any force is needed to maintain it
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Yet in the face of this widely-acknowledged difficulty, the Hyperloop project has captured public interest partially because it simultaneously provides (at least in theory) a solution to the very real problem of making travel sustainable, at scale. The global population is expected to top 11 billion by the end of this century, and much of this growth will be concentrated in cities—an estimated 2.5 billion people will be added to urban population numbers by 2050 according to a United Nations Report. Yet our roads, ports, and airports are already at capacity, and expanding existing infrastructure is its own incredibly difficult, slow, and expensive (if not downright impossible) process.

Grappling with this potential, skepticism, and doubt is something that Hyperloop One’s Chief Engineer Josh Giegel has become accustomed to.

“I sat in meetings where investors would say, ‘This is a waste of time, this will never happen’” he recently told Fortune magazine. Yet the LA-based company, which in October was officially rebranded Virgin Hyperloop One, recently managed to not only raise $85 million in funding, but to get Branson to join its board of directors. Admittedly, Giegel is a former Virgin Galactic employee and his partner Shervin Pishevar signed up for that company’s Future Astronauts program in 2012, but it is still a resounding endorsement to hear Branson talk of being “completely blown away,” when he visited their test facility in the Las Vegas desert.

Confidence from folks like Giegel largely stems from just how much work has been done given the relatively short lifetime of the modern Hyperloop industry. While things like the Usborne Book of the Future may have introduced many to the idea of maglev capsule trains running in vacuum tunnels, Musk essentially kickstarted the current crop of businesses as we now know it. That’s because when reintroducing the idea to the masses, Musk argued that he didn’t have the time to pursue it himself given his existing commitments to Tesla and SpaceX. Instead, he encouraged all interested engineers to publish open-source designs and invite critical feedback from other willing parties, essentially allowing the overall scientific and engineering communities to explore the technology and improve it collectively.

“We had reached the limits of how fast and how clean we can travel, and there’s a very straightforward physical reason for that: friction,” Maurits Houck, Technical Manager at Delft Hyperloop, told Ars during a recent trip to Holland. Simply put, going faster increases air resistance, so if you’re using wheels to move—as the majority of current transport systems do—that will also increase friction.

Hyperloops now offer a logical solution, he argues. The system removes both the air and the wheels from that friction equation. By having pods that levitate inside a vacuum tube instead, it’s possible to achieve frictionless high-speed travel that is also incredibly energy-efficient.

“As the Hyperloop levitates in a vacuum environment, there is little resistance. Therefore, when the pod reaches speed, hardly any force is needed to maintain it. This makes it faster and more sustainable than any other means of transport,” Houck explains.

This is the Hyperloop’s elevator pitch, and this enthusiastic young man is something of an authority on this subject. Houck’s student team at the Delft University of Technology—where he is currently finishing a degree in Applied Physics—were the winners of the 2017 SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition. As we toured their busy workshop, preparations were already under way for the 2018 challenge in California.

As futuristic as the design sounds, this isn’t a system starting from scratch
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As futuristic as the design sounds, this isn’t a system starting from scratch—quite the opposite, in fact. “We already have linear motors, magnetic levitation, and vacuum pumps,” explains Marleen van de Kerkhof, who heads external affairs at Hardt Hyperloop, a commercial startup which spun off from the winning Delft University Hyperloop team. The challenge, she says, lies in connecting all the pieces of the puzzle and integrating it all into existing urban transport infrastructures.

“The idea is actually 100 years old,” Houck agrees. “Basically, the Hyperloop is a combination of airplane cabin and life support systems and a maglev train. The new technical challenges come with the high speed and artificial vacuum. At such high speeds, small inaccuracies in the track can cause significant vibrations in the pod. Therefore, a balance between investing in a very accurate track or a clever suspension system needs to be found. If we want pods to depart in quick succession after one other – so as to ensure high enough passenger capacity – we need to design a very reliable communication system between the pods and an efficient airlock, or a system to bring the pods from normal air pressure to vacuum in the tube.”

Read the full article on Ars Technica

Is it time to take the Hyperloop seriously? https://t.co/goqr7eDhlc

— Ars Technica (@arstechnica) March 4, 2018

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Taking the Hyperloop Seriously appeared first on Tech Trends.

How the Netherlands is futureproofing its transport technology strategy and infrastructure by looking at the bigger picture.

The problem of moving people around efficiently is a bit of a ticking time bomb. The global population continues to grow and concentrate in already overcrowded urban centres. Add to this the fact that we’re all getting older and living longer, and the urgent need to cut down carbon emissions, and we’ve got a serious challenge on our hands. Technology will no doubt play a huge role in addressing that problem, but many of the people working on that at the moment are not doing so from Silicon Valley, but in Holland.

The problem of sustainable and efficient mobility is a big global challenge
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It will probably surprise nobody to learn that the Netherlands has the highest bicycle usage rates in the world. Much less known, however, is the fact that they also have a long and proud history of pioneering automated driving technology going back to 1995, or that its electric bus manufacturers are thriving due to the government’s directive that by 2025 every public transport vehicle sold in the country will have to be zero-emission.

I learned all this while touring Holland last month as a guest of the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency, who were keen to show off their innovation in the area of automotive technology and mobility.

As is always the case with such trips, you take everything you’re told with a healthy grain of salt, but at the end of a rather gruelling 3-day trip (the Dutch don’t believe in over-pampering journalists and even my jet-lagged American colleagues were held to strict 7:30am starts) I was still left rather impressed.

It wasn’t any one particular company or technology that stood out, however, but the way that everyone I met seemed to be so focused on how it all fit together into long-term and sustainable strategies. Much of the focus where it comes to smart mobility tends to be on the “sexier” tech of self-driving cars – it is, after all, as one of our hosts put it, “the first large-scale deployment of robotics in a society at large in human history” but that’s only part of the picture.

As vehicles become smarter, they will communicate with other vehicles and road devices
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Because as vehicles become smarter and more automated, there will also be advances in data communication between cars on the road and between cars and roadside installations. In other words, there is a need to teach those “autonomous” cars to take into account real-time data about their surroundings and other vehicles.

Automated driving in real life should take into account the role of data, object detection and social driving. These are all incredibly complex things to try and teach a machine, says Robbert Lohman from a start-up called 2getthere, which works on automated transit applications ranging from Automated People Movers to Shared Autonomous Vehicles.

The Netherlands believes that by introducing cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and focusing on infrastructure rather than just vehicles, they will be able to significantly improve traffic flows in terms of safety, efficiency and environmental impact, as well as boosting their competitiveness in terms of job opportunities and economic growth.

Economies of scale quickly add up when looking at broader infrastructure
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And when you start looking at whole infrastructure solutions, the economies of scale quickly start adding up in seemingly unlikely places. Take Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) Platooning, for example. This is the practice whereby automated/self-driving technology can be applied so that several trucks can follow one another along a road. By keeping a steady speed and very short distance from one another, they reduce factors such as wind resistance, and manage to significantly reduce fuel consumption as well as dramatically improve safety.

“I expect that our children will live in a world where humans are not allowed to drive. 1.2 million deaths are caused by traffic accidents every year. 95% of those are due to human error,” said Professor Maarten Steinbuch at TU Eindhoven University during a demonstration at the Automotive Engineering Science (AES) Laboratory.

At the Research Automated Driving Delft RADD – a facility enabled by cooperation between governments, knowledge institutions, and small and mid-size business entrepreneurs – I saw what that might look like in practice. The WEpod has been operational since early 2016 is one of the first real-life projects on automated driving in the Netherlands, the first of its kind to be allowed to operate on public roads among normal traffic. The next phase of the project will now cross the border towards Germany, explains Project Leader Jan Willem van der Wiel.

The Netherlands employs an approach of learning by doing
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One key strategic advantage the Netherlands has is that it is small enough so that looking at holistically implementing innovations over the entire country’s infrastructure is a much more practical proposition than in countries like the US, where you’re dealing with much broader territories and regulatory variations.

This, together with the fact that Dutch infrastructure is among the best in Europe (the entire country has 4G coverage) makes it an ideal test bed for piloting ambitious mobility tech. A sort of controlled “living lab” microcosm that allows for reliable real-world data capture.

According to Edwin Nas from the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and The Environment, the belief is that the Dutch “learning by doing” approach gives the country an edge by allowing them to iterate and adjust systems, adapting both domestic and international legislation to the landscape as it evolves.

There is also, he adds, a culture of collaboration both within Holland and at a European and Global level. A coordinated approach at a European level and closer cooperation between governments and stakeholders is needed for these innovative systems to reach market, he concludes.

The Research pipeline is closely integrated into the broader strategic vision too, with many independent and industry-backed R&D hubs such as the Holst Centre developing wireless sensor technologies, and an impressive crop of students achieving remarkable success in international competitions that push experimental and bleeding-edge technologies.

The Research pipeline is closely integrated into the broader strategic vision
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Zuyd University’s Project Fuze, for example, are engineering a 3D-printed race car for Formula Student races in order to demonstrate how it is possible to build lighter and sustainable vehicles without compromising safety, while the Delft Hyperloop team won Elon Musk’s global competition to develop a prototype for an ultra high-speed train system that will in theory allow travellers to go from London to Edinburgh in under 30 minutes. Now the Hardt Hyperloop is working with some of Holland’s largest corporations to develop what they hope will be the world’s first commercial Hyperloop route.

Sustainability is also a big part of the Dutch mobility equation
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Sustainability is also a big part of that overall equation, and various companies are working on the problem of lowering emissions from different angles. Solliance is developing next-generation solar cells, for example, and Eurocarbon produces composite materials from fibres such as glass, aramid carbon and thermoplastics which are up to 50% lighter than steel, and provide up to 40% saving in energy consumption, again without compromising on strength and safety.

This agenda of connecting expertise to improve mobility in a sustainable and socially responsible way is supported by several organisations at a national and local level. Connekt is an independent network which brings together members from across the private sector, academia, public interest groups and government to promote smart, sustainable and social mobility, while the last stop on our tour – Amsterdam Smart City connects communities to share expertise and kick-start projects that futureproof the country’s capital.

And it’s in Amsterdam that some of the most interesting experiments in integrating different solutions into a holistic framework are being rolled out. The idea of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) essentially involves the use of a unified software platform to manage resources so that both individual and collective transport needs are met seamlessly, and with little or no waste of resources.

Mobility as a Service could become a widespread model for city mobility
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Companies like Next Urban Mobility want to create hubs which integrate use of cars, bikes, public transport and delivery services in intelligent and data-driven ways. Their ambition is to be a sort of “Netflix for transportation” providing on-demand services as and when users want it. The reasoning behind this is that – just as most of us would now rather stream content rather than having hundreds of DVD and Blu-rays gathering dust on our shelves – the next generation will probably wonder how anybody could ever justify having a car that’s only used every two weeks or so, as is the case with the average Amsterdam car owner.

As I flew back to the UK – once again thinking glumly of Brexit as I glanced at the “EU passport holders” sign at the airport – my head was spinning from information overload, and I couldn’t quite decide whether this all made perfect sense or if the vision Holland is aiming for was a crazily ambitious pipe dream.

Wasn’t this a case of – to again borrow a popular Brexit analogy – “having your cake and eating it?” Pulling off such a nationwide smart mobility plan would, according to most people I spoke to, eventually deliver an infrastructure where all their citizen’s transportation needs would be met much more quickly, cheaply and safely – all the while advancing science and technology, protecting the environment and contributing to boosting the domestic, regional and global economy.

But I suppose for a country that has more than its fair share of tall good-looking people that speak four or five languages fluently, that might not seem like such a strange thing after all. The Dutch personality combines the practical bend of the Germans with a dose of daredevil craziness, which means they’re often game for experimenting with new things. And since leaps of innovation rarely happen without some degree of risk, they might be onto something.

This article was originally published on The Next Web

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Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Intelligent Mobility Goes Beyond Driverless Cars appeared first on Tech Trends.