Nokia said that the call was enabled by the new Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) codec technology which is part of the upcoming 5G Advanced (5G-A) standard Finnish vendor Nokia said it has completed what it claims to be 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 vendor said in a release.

The Nordic vendor said that the call was enabled by new Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) codec technology, which is part of the upcoming 5G Advanced (5G-A) standard. The IVAS codec allows consumers to hear sound spatially in real-time instead of today’s monophonic smartphone voice call experience, according to Nokia.

“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. Immersive communications technology will also take XR and metaverse interaction to the next level,” said Lindström.

“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,” said Lundmark.

The Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) codec technology enables live spatial audio across any connected devices, bringing people together for real-life interaction with three-dimensional sound, the vendor said.

Nokia also explained that the 3GPP IVAS codec standard has been developed by a consortium of 13 companies under the framework of the IVAS codec public collaboration. Nokia said it had a key role 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 claimed 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, it added.