Nokia delivers the world’s first direct 3D spatial audio and voice call over a cellular network. Pekka Lundmark, President and CEO of Nokia, held an exciting live audio and video conference with Stefan Lindström, Finnish Ambassador for Digitalization and New Technologies.
The call is made possible thanks to 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 real-time spatial audio instead of today’s monophonic voice call on a smartphone. Lundmark demonstrated to Lindström the special acoustic parameters that can be experienced with the new IVAS technology by calling him from the Nokia campus in Espoo.
Stefan Lindström, Finnish Ambassador for Digitalization and New Technologies, said: “The immersive live voice and audio provided by IVAS enhances call richness and quality, while 3D audio makes interactions more lifelike and engaging, bringing a host of new benefits to personal and professional communication. “Immersive communications technologies will also take the interaction between XR and the metaverse to the next level.”
Pekka Lundmark, Nokia President and CEO said: “We’ve demonstrated the future of voice calling. “This innovative audio technology puts you in the caller’s environment, creating a dramatically improved spatial listening experience for voice and video calls, delivering significant benefits for business and industrial applications.”
Jenny Lukander, President of Nokia Technologies, said: “I am proud of the leading role that Nokia researchers and engineers have played in creating these innovative immersive voice and audio technologies. Thanks to standardization, everyone will now benefit from this innovation.”
Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) codec technology delivers vibrant spatial audio through any connected device (such as smartphones, tablets or PCs), bringing people together to truly interact with 3D audio. This is the biggest advance in real-time voice calling since the advent of monaural telephone audio used in smartphones and PCs today.
The 3GPP IVAS codec standard was developed by a consortium of 13 companies as part of the public collaboration on the IVAS codec. Nokia has been a leader in these standardization efforts and contributed important pieces of technology to the standard, including developing a special smartphone format for the IVAS standard. Incorporating this innovation into a global standard is key to enabling interoperability between operators, chipset manufacturers and handsets, making spatial connectivity accessible to everyone.
Nokia was able to successfully demonstrate IVAS technology in real-time calling, although the technology has not yet been implemented in mobile networks. This first direct call used Nokia’s patented Immersive Voice technology to deliver audio over a public 5G network.
Nokia is a leader in standards development and has one of the world’s strongest communications technology patent portfolios, with more than 20,000 patent families, of which more than 6,000 patent families are declared essential for 5G.
Source: Digital Trends
