Thirty teams from four countries will descend on the headquarters of SpaceX in Hawthorne, California from Jan. 27-29 to compete in the first Hyperloop Pod Competition that will set the stage for a new mode of transportation called the Hyperloop.

Each team will bring with them a prototype transport vehicle or pod, and will demonstrate the capabilities of his pod and how it plans to surmount the technical challenges presented by the revolutionary Hyperloop concept.

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These specially designed pods will compete in "pod races" inside a 1.6 kilometer-long subscale SpaceX Hyperloop test track that will be a partial vacuum.

The test track or Hypertube is also a prototype. SpaceX anticipates learning from the process that led to building Hypertube. More important, the company will use this experience to apply automated construction techniques to future Hyperloop tracks.

The 30 finalists are the survivors of more than 1,000 teams that joined the competition, which began on June 15, 2015. Twenty nine of the 30 teams are student teams representing universities from around the world.

Most of the finalists are teams from the United States. The only non-student team is a group organized through Reddit, the social news and media discussion website. There is also one team from India.

The teams that advanced to the prototype hardware build stage are:

Badgerloop, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Bayou Bengals, Louisiana State University; bLoop, University of California-Berkeley; Carnegie Mellon Hyperloop, Carnegie-Mellon University; Codex, Oral Roberts University; Delft Hyperloop, Delft University of Technology

Drexel Hyperloop, Drexel University; GatorLoop, University of Florida; HyperLift, St. John's School Texas (the only high school team); Hyperloop UC, University of Cincinnati; Hyperloop Toronto, University of Toronto; Hyperloop at Virginia Tech, Virginia Tech

HyperXite, University of California Irvine; Illini Hyperloop, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Keio Alpha,  Keio University, Japan; Lehigh Hyperloop, Lehigh University; Hyperloop Makers UPV team Valencia, Spain, Universitat Politècnica de Valencia.

Mercury Three, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; MIT Hyperloop Team, Massachusetts Institute of Technology;  NYU Hyperloop, Slate, New York University; OpenLoop, Cornell University, Harvey Mudd College, University of Michigan, Northeastern University, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Princeton University

Purdue Hyperloop, Purdue University; Team rLoop, the only non-student team and organized on Reddit; TAMU Aerospace Hyperloop, Texas A&M; Team Frigates, Shiv Nadar University in India; Team HyperLynx, University of Colorado-Denver

UCSB Hyperloop, University of California-Santa Barbara; UMD Loop, University of Maryland; USC Hyperloop, University of Southern California; UWashington Hyperloop, University of Washington; Waterloop, University of Waterloo in Canada; VicHyper, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia and WARR Hyperloop, Technical University of Munich in Germany.

TagsSpaceX, Hyperloop Pod Competition, Hyperloop, Hypertube, pods, california