Québec City helps machines read the world
How one of Canada’s innovation hubs brings optics, AI and computer vision to life for event leaders
For a country as vast as Canada, monitoring the far reaches of its north has long tested the limits of observation. Dense boreal forests and Arctic landscapes can stretch across immense distances, often in areas beyond those humans can easily reach.
At Université Laval’s Northern Robotics Laboratory (NorLab) in Québec City, researchers are using AI, sensors and autonomous robots to study and navigate these demanding environments. In the Arctic, temperatures can fall below -50°C, while “featureless landscapes” can make positioning difficult.
The work at NorLab draws on expertise that Québec City has built over decades in optics, photonics and computer vision, fields that help machines to see and interpret the physical world. Now those capabilities are converging with AI, allowing machines to make more sense of the environments around them.
Québec City is one of several Canadian innovation hubs with distinctive areas of expertise. Innovate Canada 2026 brought international business event decision-makers to the city to explore its technology ecosystem at first hand. Through visits with researchers, founders and sector leaders, delegates saw digital technologies at work.
Virginie De Visscher, executive director of Business Events for Destination Canada, contrasts that approach with the familiar experience of flying into a city, moving between hotel and conference venue, and leaving again with little sense of where the event took place. “It couldn’t matter where it was,” she says.
Innovate Canada instead took participants beyond the conference room to meet the people and visit the places where technology is being applied. Some technologies are helping machines to interpret the physical world, while others are changing how people experience it. That work can be seen across Québec City’s labs, factories, forests and city streets.
Reading the room
LÜ AND INTERACTIVE SPACES
At Lü Interactive Playground, a 3D sensor tracks people and objects moving through a room, allowing projection, light and sound to react in real time. During Innovate Canada, delegates visited Lü to see the technology in action.
Vincent Routhier, Lü’s founder and CEO, got his start in music, film and interactive media, while the company draws on sensing technology, software and education. That mix reflects Québec City’s compact, cross-disciplinary technology ecosystem, in which researchers and companies can easily find one another and combine their expertise.
“We’re always one degree or two hops away from someone useful. We have a really good culture of collaboration,” says Christian Gagné, director of Université Laval’s Institute for Intelligence and Data.
For visiting delegates, that proximity means the people and companies that make up the ecosystem are rarely far apart. A conversation about computer vision or AI can quickly lead to the researchers applying these technologies, and to the places where they are at work.
Mr Gagné also points to long-standing strengths in industrial engineering and logistics, fields that were already well established as AI began to mature.
The numbers help to explain that concentration.
Québec City’s density advantage
5,500+researchers and associates
Canada’s highest ratio of researchers per capita
400labs, research centres and institutes
500+high-tech companies
Reading the skin
OMY AND PERSONALISED SKINCARE
One company that has drawn on this density of expertise is Omy Laboratoires, where AI and cosmetic science come together to create personalised skincare.
Founder Rachelle Séguin had wanted to create a skincare brand since she was young. She moved from Montréal to Québec City to study cosmetic chemistry, while working evenings and weekends as a beauty adviser. There, she discovered how difficult it could be for customers to find products that suited their skin.
She decided to reverse the industry’s usual logic: start with the customer rather than with a finished product on the shelf. At Omy, AI analyses a person’s skin and other data, then translates that information into a formulation made specifically for them.
Turning that analysis into a physical product presented a different challenge: how do you make a different product for every customer?
Reading the supply chain
OPTEL AND PRODUCT TRACEABILITY
At OPTEL, the challenge is visibility on a global scale.
Founded in Québec City in 1989, the company began with machine vision: cameras and software checked products and packaging as they moved through a factory. In pharmaceuticals, one of OPTEL’s core markets, that might mean inspecting a pack of medicine.
Today, the company can follow that same pack far beyond the factory, using serial numbers and digital traceability to track its journey through distributors to the point of dispensing. That visibility can help to verify that a product is genuine and make recalls easier to manage.
Reading the city
GOOGLE GREEN LIGHT AND TRAFFIC FLOWS
For a city, the challenge shifts from tracking products to understanding how thousands of vehicles move through a shared network.
Québec City has spent the past decade building its own traffic-management system for 900 traffic lights. In 2025, it became the first city in Canada to launch Google Green Light, which uses AI to analyse driving trends from Google Maps and traffic-light data, and then recommends adjustments to signal timing at specific intersections and times of day. City engineers decide which recommendations to implement.
Mr des Rivières says Google has measured a 12% reduction in stop-and-go in Québec City, compared with around 30% in other participating cities. He attributes the smaller gain to the efficiency of the city’s existing traffic-management system, which had already been refined over the previous decade.
That system has attracted visitors from municipalities across Canada, the US and Europe. Among them were two groups attending a Transportation Association of Canada event, who came to see it in operation.
For event organisers, visits like these can make the destination part of the programme itself. A conversation about mobility, AI or urban systems can extend to the people working on them and the places where the technology is at work.
In Québec City, ideas discussed inside an event can be encountered outside it: in rooms that respond to people, skincare products that are made to individual specifications, supply chains that can be readily traced and streets whose signals are being refined with the help of AI.
That same principle extends to innovation hubs across Canada. As Meaghan Ferrigno, Destination Canada’s interim president and CEO, puts it: when an event draws on the expertise around it, “your destination no longer is a backdrop. It actually becomes either a partnership or a participant in your event.”
