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.

Visionaries and their inventions often draw inspiration from works of fiction.

From Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Greek Mythology, in this Quartz article I look at what has drawn people like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Tim Berners Lee to some of their favourite books, and how they have inspired their work, shaping the technology they invented, and changing the world we all live in today.

When it comes to technology, reality often plays catch-up to fiction
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Mark Twain is best known for all-American novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. But he was also a forward-thinking futurist. Back in 1898, in his short story From The London Times, Twain described a gadget called the Telelectroscope—a “limitless-distance” telephone that connected people around the globe. “By grace of this marvelous instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air… Now and then I would hear him say, ‘Give me Hong-Kong’; next, ‘Give me Melbourne’ … Sometimes the talk that came from those far regions through the microphone attachment interested me, and I listened.”

Another book that paints a picture of what Virtual Reality worlds might look like is William Gibson’s Neuromancer
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Indeed, when it comes to technology, reality often plays catch-up to fiction. So it should come as no surprise that some of the people responsible for the greatest technological strides of the past decades cite literature as a source of inspiration. Here are a few of the books that have fired up the imaginations of our biggest innovators and fed their ambition to transform the world.

Mark Twain is best known for novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but he was also a futurist
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Dial F For Frankenstein

Internet inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee drew his inspiration from science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who coined the famous quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and described satellites in such detail he could have patented the idea 20 years before they became reality. Clarke’s story Dial F For Frankenstein, set in 1975, describes an automatic telephone exchange system with the equivalent number of switches as there are neurons in the human brain.

The Aenid

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg reads a lot—in 2015, he even fit reading a book every two weeks in around his rather packed schedule. But his choice of favorite tome might raise a few eyebrows: The Aeneid by Virgil. It recounts Aeneas’ quest after he escapes the ruins of Troy to build a city that “knows no boundaries in time and greatness.” Some might say that his empire-building tendencies could have its roots in his penchant for Ancient Roman classics.

Snow Crash

Google co-founder Sergey Brin named Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as one of his favorite novels, and other tech innovators cite it as having directly inspired the development of Google Earth. He’s not the only one to have been inspired by the 1992 novel and its description of online social networks and virtual worlds: Second Life creator Philip Rosedale is also a fan, and the platform’s users routinely using the novel’s term “the Metaverse” to describe Second Life. (In the book, the term describes a virtual-reality-based internet much like Rosedale’s latest VR project, High Fidelity.) Appropriately, Stephenson is currently the “chief futurist” at mixed-reality (MR) company Magic Leap.

Tom Swift

You might not have heard of Jack Cover, but you will be familiar with his most famous invention: the Taser. The NASA researcher was inspired to create the device first described in his favorite childhood book, Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (which, we should note, was riddled with racist narratives including the fictional taser being used on “savages” while raiding Africa for ivory). In fact “Taser” is an acronym for Thomas A Swift Electric Rifle.

Neuromancer

Another book that paints a picture of what virtual-reality worlds might look like is William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Jeremy Bailenson, founder of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, credits the book with inspiring him to become a scholar of avatars. The 1984 book about a washed-up hacker hired to pull out a risky hack against a mysterious employer also inspired The Matrix films.

Greek mythology

Mythology has helped inspire the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Bristol University scholar Genevieve Liveley regularly lectures on the theme of “cyborgs and robots in Greek myth,” and at the recent Love and Sex with Robots conference in London, she delivered a fascinating talk on how the myth of Galatea—the ivory statue which is brought to life by the sculptor Pygmalion—can be extremely helpful in informing how we think about human-machine interaction in future. “As a historian, I’m reminded that when we try to anticipate the future, our cognitive parameters and frames are shaped by the past,” she said at the conference. “We are really, really bad at anticipating the future with any degree of certainty, so one of the ways we try and do it is by telling stories.”

Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy

In his book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, tech journalist Ashlee Vance wrote that Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a major inspiration for the entrepreneur. Musk says the books made him realize how “a lot of times the question is harder than the answer.” The novels, which have been translated into more than 30 languages, follow the misadventures of the last surviving human following the demolition of planet Earth by an alien construction fleet. Plenty of other members of the tech crowd are big Adams fans, too. In fact, if you ask Google for the answer to the novel’s central question—the meaning of life—the search engine will promptly return, in calculator mode, the story’s answer: 42.

Fiction is a powerful tool for helping visionaries invent the future
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From Elon’s love of “Hitchhiker’s” to Zuckerberg’s Greek epics: How literature has inspired technology https://t.co/BX20geAN3h

— Quartz (@qz) December 29, 2016

 

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 How Literature Inspires Technology appeared first on Tech Trends.