Nokia may no longer be the most popular mobile phone brand, but the company has continued its works in advancing communications, switching directions from phones to innovative networking technologies. The company is now a leader in standards development and holds one of the world’s strongest patent portfolios of connectivity technologies, with over 20,000 patent families of which over 6,000 patent families are declared as essential to 5G.
In a world first, the company’s CEO, Pekka Lundmark, held a live immersive audio and video call over a cellular network 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. Usable on any type of device – smartphones, tablets, computers – the IVAS codec allows consumers to hear sound spatially in real-time instead of today’s monophonic smartphone voice call experience.
We have demonstrated the future of voice calls.
Pekka Lundmark, Nokia President and CEO
“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”, said Lundmark.
The IVAS codec technology enables live spatial audio with three-dimensional sound, according to Nokia, which calls it “the biggest leap forward in the live voice calling experience since the introduction of monophonic telephony audio used in smartphones and PCs today.” Even though the technology has not yet been implemented in mobile networks, the call between Lundmark and Lindström was possible using Nokia’s proprietary Immersive Voice technology to achieve the experience over a public 5G network.
“The live immersive voice and audio experience enabled by IVAS improves the richness and quality of the call, and the three-dimensional sound experience makes interaction more lifelike and engaging, bringing a wealth of new benefits to personal and professional communication”, Lindström commented on the quality of the call, “Immersive communications technology will also take XR and metaverse interaction to the next level.”
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.
