Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS)

About IVAS

The telephone is arguably one of humankind’s greatest inventions. Thanks to its evolution, it has not only become an everyday occurrence to discuss business information with a person at the other side of the world, we also share experiences with people who live in a different city or even just around the corner. Today, the dull-sounding voices of early telephony are history thanks to sophisticated technology such as the communication codec Enhanced Voice Services (EVS). It has even become possible to add an additional video connection to the audio. Still – a call is just not the same as a face-to-face conversation. One of the reasons is that almost 150 years after its invention, telephony is still largely one-dimensional: Whereas a "real" conversation takes place in a multi-dimensional world, in which distance and direction of the perceived sounds match the location of their sources, telephony is traditionally monaural, which means that it does not transmit spatial information. This one-dimensional experience is one of the main reasons many people find telephone calls and particularly conference and group calls exhausting and lifeless: They quite literally fall flat and processing one-dimensional sensations in a multi-dimensional world can be quite tiring.

Modern telephones are usually equipped with the hardware needed to capture spatial audio. Plus, most earbuds, car speakers, soundbars, and even phone and laptop speakers deliver stereo or immersive sound. Together with the latest innovation in audio coding, these developments can open the door to sharing truly lifelike experiences through a phone call. Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS), the new 3GPP codec available from Release 18, enables the transmission of spatial audio over mobile networks. It is optimized for the highly efficient compression of immersive audio and supports stereo and immersive formats including multi-channel, Ambisonics, objects, and metadata-assisted spatial audio (MASA). Additionally, it supports the combination of Ambisonics or MASA with objects. With advanced rendering capabilities, IVAS enables the reproduction on both, headphones and loudspeakers, incorporating features like head tracking, orientation tracking, and split rendering. This makes it possible to transmit a full, spatial audio scene and creates completely new communication possibilities. With IVAS, we do not just talk on the phone anymore, but we can fully focus on a conversation or just be in the shared moment.

Download our AES Convention Paper

Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) Codec – The New 3GPP Standard for Immersive Communication

Download Paper

See the 3GPP Standards and Technical Specifications

Room for Real-life Experiences

Immersive Calls

Share what happens in your life with a simple phone call. IVAS captures the 3D audio scene around you and transmits it to the listener. This is great for sharing the full immersive experience of an event or outdoor experience.

Ad-hoc Conferencing

Sometimes, you just have to do an impromptu meeting and call one or more participants on their smartphones. By positioning the telephone amidst your group, IVAS can pick up a realistic acoustic image of the surrounding people, convey and render it again at one or multiple receivers.

Multi-party Conferencing

Participating in a telephone conference with multiple callers can be an acoustic challenge. IVAS transmits voices as individual streams and spatially renders them on the receiving device – it can even match them to a video scene that is transmitted in parallel. Individual voices’ volume and position can be adapted as needed.