SpaceX announced in June that it will be holding a competition for the design of the Hyperloop pod, which will shuttle human passengers in a closed system of transportation tubes. Its first phase will begin Friday, as college students flock to the Texas A&M University to showcase their ideas.  

This stage of the competition, which is dubbed as SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition Design Weekend, will be participated by as much as 120 teams, according to the organizers. Four teams composed of high school students are also competing, and a winner from this batch will be sponsored by Nickelodeon. The teams will present their respective concepts to attract sponsors, who will then fund the development of the actual model of their proposals. The winning team, which will be selected after the final phase is completed in the summer of 2016, gets to test their pod in a specialized track to be built later this year, Popular Science reported.

"I'm nervous," Nick Hemstreet, a member of Texas A&M's HyperWhoop team, said in an official press release. "But I'm mostly excited about talking to industry people about how to improve our design and walking around and talking to other teams about what they've done."

The Hyperloop concept is the brainchild of Elon Musk. The goal is to build a futuristic transportation system that can shuttle humans from city to city at supersonic speed (around 800 mph). Several companies are already building test tracks in the race to build the first working Hyperloop infrastructure, with one firm slated to break ground four months from now, as HNGN previously reported.