Skip to main content

Q-Free unveils futuristic Q-City virtual reality experience

Q-Free broke the mould when it unveiled Q-City at 2014’s Intertraffic. A computerised rendering of a modern urban area, Q-City allows users to look at how the company’s large suite of ITS products work with each other to make roads safer, cleaner and less congested. At this year’s show, Q-Free and Q-City have gone a step further and visitors can enjoy a fully immersive virtual reality tour.
April 4, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
Jenny Simonsen of Q-Free
108 Q-Free broke the mould when it unveiled Q-City at 2014’s Intertraffic. A computerised rendering of a modern urban area, Q-City allows users to look at how the company’s large suite of ITS products work with each other to make roads safer, cleaner and less congested. At this year’s show, Q-Free and Q-City have gone a step further and visitors can enjoy a fully immersive virtual reality tour.


Q-City brings the process of understanding ITS into the 21st Century. Starting from a bird’s-eye view, it makes it possible to zoom in and out to explore application areas such as tolling, traffic management, parking and infomobility and to see how these previously discrete sectors have moved together to become more holistic and connected. The new virtual reality experience enables users to stand at street level and gain an even more ‘hands-on’ perspective.

“We’re a technology innovator, so it makes sense to use technology to demonstrate what we do,” says Jenny Simonsen, Q-Free’s Global Director Marketing & Communication. “It’s more than just a gimmick. By being able to move quickly around a cityscape, either alone or in the company of our technology experts, it’s possible to gain a real feel for what ITS can do far more quickly than might otherwise be the case.

“The virtual reality tours aren’t the only way in which Q-City has evolved. Q-Free has spent a lot of time since the last Intertraffic expanding and fine-tuning its portfolio. We’ve needed to reflect the new additions and the finessing which has occurred,” says Simonsen. “This latest version of Q-City is right up to date and features all of our products and services.”

Q-City also forms the centrepiece of a group experience here at Intertraffic. Each day at 3pm, the company’s Chief Technologist, Knut Evensen, will use it to give a guided tour of the company’s ITS capabilities, followed by drinks and networking opportunities.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • IBTTA's Pat Jones: 'It’s about expanding people's comfort zone and mine as well'
    October 24, 2024
    For two decades, Pat Jones, has been executive director and CEO of IBTTA. As he approaches retirement at the end of this year, he talks to Adam Hill about a career spent ‘stretching and growing’ – and helping others to do the same
  • Reflecting on five years of important ITS progress
    January 7, 2013
    Former head of the ITS Joint Program Office Shelley Row has passed the baton to a new director. Now working as an independent consultant, here she reflects on her five years at the helm of the JPO and what the future may hold for ITS in the US. During a mid-morning in Paris earlier this year, having just landed, I decided to take a trip on the city’s subway (Paris’ underground metro) into the city centre. A family with a small boy – about nine years old – boarded the same train. They were American and we st
  • Why integrated traffic management needs a cohesive approach
    April 10, 2012
    Traffic control is increasingly being viewed as one essential element of a wider ‘system of systems’ – the smart city. Jason Barnes, Jon Masters and David Crawford report on latest ideas and efforts for making cities ‘smarter’ Virtually every element of the fabric and utilitarian operations that make urban areas tick can now be found somewhere in the mix that is the ‘smart city’ agenda. Ideas have expanded and projects pursued in different directions as the rhetoric on making cities ‘smarter’ has grown. App
  • Dutch survey shows drivers are in favour of road user charging
    January 16, 2012
    'Keep it simple, stupid' is an oft-forgotten axiom but in terms of road user charging it is entirely appropriate. So says the ANWB's Ferry Smith. A couple of decades ago, it might have been largely true that the technology aspects of advanced road infrastructure were the main obstacles to deployment. However, 20 years or more of development have led to a situation where such 'obstacles' are often no more than a political fig-leaf. Area-wide Road User Charging (RUC) is a case in point; speak candidly to syst