BIG teaser video reveals Hyperloop plans for Abu Dhabi and Dubai

In this exclusive video from BIG, partner Jakob Lange discusses how its plans for a Hyperloop high-speed transportation system between Abu Dhabi and Dubai will transform how people live. 

Jakob Lange is director of BIG Ideas, a unit at the Danish firm focusing on technically demanding and experimental projects – including the "grand vision" for Hyperloop One.

The high-speed transportation system will link Abu Dhabi with Dubai, two cities more than 150 kilometres apart in the United Arab Emirates.

In this sneak preview, Lange shows snippets of the design before its official unveiling on 7 November 2016 in Dubai.

"We are in a new time now where you can develop a new transportation system in very few years and change the world," said Lange.

"We're not waiting for new technology like carbon nanofibers or anything in order to do this," he added. "We have everything we need to do it."

Hyperloop is the vision of entrepreneur Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors, Paypal and space exploration company SpaceX.

He first unveiled the concept for a Hyperloop – in which air-cushioned pods are pushed at high speed through a semi-vacuumed tube – in 2013. Musk later open-sourced the technology and is no longer directly involved in its development.

Hyperloop One is one of a number of companies racing to build Hyperloop. It appointed BIG alongside architecture and engineering firms AECOM and Arup to convert the technology into infrastructure.

The movie shows a network of tubes elevated on Y-shaped stilts, as well as a preview of one of the pods that will travel inside it.

Lange claims the infrastructure has the potential to transform how people live, giving them greater choice over where they live by connecting remote regions with the city in a matter of minutes.

"This is about creating a love for the new possibilities out there. Suddenly you can live in a forest, take the Hyperloop into work everyday and its only going to take 10 minutes," he said.

"You spread out the possibilities for everybody to live where they want: by the sea, by the water, in the forest, wherever."

Hyperloop One carried out testing of its propulsion technology for Hyperloop in the the desert outside Las Vegas earlier this year, where it achieved speeds of 187 km/h in 1.1 seconds.

The company's main competitor is Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, which is currently building a test track in California and is already in discussions to build a Hyperloop between the European cities of Budapest, Vienna and Bratislava.

Video is by Mirage Studio.