Nokia has made a live immersive voice and audio call over a cellular network. 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.

The call was enabled by the new Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) codec technology which is part of the upcoming 5G Advanced standard. The IVAS codec allows consumers to hear sound spatially in real-time instead of today’s monophonic smartphone voice call experience. Lundmark demonstrated the distinctive acoustic dimensions that can be experienced with the new IVAS technology to Lindström while calling him from Nokia’s campus in Espoo.

The Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) codec technology enables live spatial audio across any connected devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets or PCs), bringing people together for real-life interaction with three-dimensional sound. It is the biggest leap forward in the live voice calling experience since the introduction of monophonic telephony audio used in smartphones and PCs today.

The 3GPP IVAS codec standard has been developed by a consortium of 13 companies under the framework of the IVAS codec public collaboration. Nokia has been a leader in these standardization efforts and has contributed major parts of the technology to the standard, including the development of a smartphone specific format for the IVAS standard. Including this innovation in a worldwide standard is the key to enabling interoperability between operators, chipset and handset manufacturers, making spatial communication available for all.

Nokia 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.