Nokia has announced that it has made the world’s first live immersive voice and audio call over a cellular network. This uses new Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) codec technology, which is part of the upcoming 5G Advanced standard.
Pekka Lundmark, Nokia‘s President and CEO, held a live immersive audio and video call with Stefan Lindström, Finland’s Ambassador of Digitalization and New Technologies, said the company.
IVAS allows consumers to hear sound spatially in real-time, instead of the monophonic voice experience used in smartphones and PCs today. Nokia CEO said that this will be useful for enterprise and industrial applications.
The Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) codec technology enables live spatial audio across any connected devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets or PCs) offering a three-dimensional sound.
Nokia said that it was able to successfully demonstrate the IVAS technology in a real-time call, even though the technology has not yet been implemented in mobile networks.
This first live call used Nokia’s proprietary Immersive Voice technology to achieve the experience over a public 5G network.
The technology is part of the upcoming 5G Advanced standard and Nokia aims to get licensing opportunities with the technology, and it should take a few years to be available widely, according to Reuters.