Spatial audio technology has been used on music streaming services and even in the Apple Vision Pro. But Nokia has now announced they have made video calls with spatial audio over the world's first cellular network. The call was between Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark and Stefan Lindström, Finland's Ambassador for Digitization and New Technologies.
According to Nokia, calls are made with audio that sounds realistic as if talking to an individual who is actually in front of your eyes compared to the current 2D audio. No changes need to be made to the existing phone to make these calls. Instead, it only needs to support the Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) codec which is part of the 5G Advanced standard that will be introduced later.
Immersive Voice technology is developed by a consortium of 13 companies that Nokia is a member of. They have been showing this technology since 2022 and at that time it was just a demo.