When traveling I often consider trains, and especially overnight trains. It's by far the most comfortable way to travel. Innovation in this space is a good thing.

While I'm aware that feature creepy is the enemy here, I would suggest a way to "combine " two pods for those traveling as a couple. If I'm traveling with my wife we don't want to be in "separate pods".

A retractable "wall" between 2 pods would be fine. It doesn't have to be elaborate, but you wanna point to something outside and say 'look at that' etc.

We considered connecting pods. The orientation „behind“ each other makes interaction difficult.

They way this issue was „resolved“ more less naturally during testing is that the pods all have The same orientation, so pods across the aisle approximately face each other. In our lab we had two iterations of the pods set up to face each other, and tester and testee interacted quite naturally —- once we set up our test rig like that, the questions „what about couples“ reduced a lot, most understood the vis-a-vis intuitively.

Our bigger cabins have two ppl versions, but a lot (if not most) travel is individua anyway, especially if night trains will be used for work travel.