Nokia Makes the World’s First Immersive Call

Nokia made the world’s first 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, a 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.

"We have demonstrated the future of voice calls. This groundbreaking audio technology takes you to the caller’s environment creating a spatial and massively improved listening experience for voice and video calls, offering significant benefits for enterprise and industrial applications," Lundmark said.

The IVAS codec technology enables live spatial audio across any connected device, 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. 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.