The “first” live immersive voice and audio call over a cellular network has been made by Nokia (NYSE: NOK) officials. 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 for traditional voice service. It addresses the demand for immersive multimedia services, including multi-stream teleconferencing, virtual reality conversational content streaming.
“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 said.
The IVAS codec was selected by 3GPP for Release 18 of its standard in August of 2023. It is an extension of the 3GPP Enhanced Voice Services (EVS) codec, offering complete bit-exact EVS codec functionality for mono speech/audio signal input and support of stereo and binaural audio. EVS is a “super-wideband” speech audio coding standard that was developed for VoLTE and VoNR.
Led by Nokia, the 3GPP IVAS codec standard was developed by a consortium of 13 companies under the framework of the IVAS codec public collaboration. The standard enables interoperability between operators, chipset and handset manufacturers.
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