SXSW panel reveals what the Virgin Hyperloop from SF to LA will look, feel and sound like

“If you think about your life as a designer, how many times do you get to design an experience that no one has ever experienced before? It’s actually quite rare,” says John Baratt, the CEO of Teague, one of the firms behind the Hyperloop aesthetics.

One of the biggest challenges is creating a sense of trust for travelers who may be skeptical of the new mode of transportation. That means avoiding futuristic tropes.

“With any form of near future vision, there’s a great tendency for designers to go all ‘Tron’-like, or ‘Star Wars,’ with the interiors,” says Baratt. “We didn’t want to do that with this interior. Remember, we’re trying to build trust in a brand new form of mobility than can travel up to 1000 kilometers an hour in an unusual environment.”

The mentality led Virgin to take a hospitality-first approach. Since there’s no windows, dynamic ambient lighting will simulate time of the day via a false skylight and create a subtle sense of movement for each pod’s 23 passengers. A living wall of plants adds a touch of green.

Joel Beckerman, a composer at Man Made Music, spoke of scoring the music leading up to entering the Hyperloop as something intended to hype people up, which contrasts the calmer sounds one can expect inside. Beckerman is considering not just general musical sensibilities, but also biometric effects of the sound on passengers. However, don’t expect a constant stream of elevator music once you’re on the Hyperloop itself.

“It’s almost like the design exercise we think about as sound people is, where can we take the sound out? It’s not more sound, it’s much less sound because just like John and Jakob [Lange] do, we think about white space in design,” says Beckerman. “For us, white space in design is silence or perception of silence. Getting rid of the general chaos and din of noise in many forms of transportation, that’s the part that drives me crazy.”

Perhaps the most interesting revelation concerned how a passenger actually boards the Hyperloop.

“Our aim was to almost completely eliminate the feeling of being inside a typical airport or train station, but that you’re at the gate instantly,” says Jakob Lange, partner at Bjarke Ingels Group, who hopes to solve the nagging problem that travelers often spend more time going through security and waiting at their gate than actually on a plane.

The intention is to make the time from leaving your home to takeoff as seamless and quick as possible. On that note, the designers think that should the Hyperloop succeed, cutting down the commute time could reimagine cities themselves, expanding their relative boundaries by hundreds of miles. And although it sounds like science fiction, it may be a reality sooner than anyone realizes, as Virgin is aiming to have their Hyperloop certified for safety by 2025, and begin operation in 2030.