Navigation Pixie: Implementation and Empirical Study Toward On-demand Navigation Agents in Commercial Metaverse

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03216v1
• Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2025 08:45:34 GMT
• Title: Navigation Pixie: Implementation and Empirical Study Toward On-demand Navigation Agents in Commercial Metaverse
• Authors: Hikari Yanagawa, Yuichi Hiroi, Satomi Tokida, Yuji Hatada, Takefumi Hiraki,
• Abstract summary: We present Navigation Pixie, an on-demand navigation agent employing a loosely coupled architecture that integrates structured spatial metadata with natural language processing.<n>Our cross-platform experiments on commercial metaverse platform Cluster with 99 PC client and 94 VR-HMD participants demonstrated that Navigation Pixie significantly increased dwell time and free exploration.<n>This research contributes to advancing VR interaction design through conversational spatial navigation agents.
• Score: 3.05484549776329
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: While commercial metaverse platforms offer diverse user-generated content, they lack effective navigation assistance that can dynamically adapt to users' interests and intentions. Although previous research has investigated on-demand agents in controlled environments, implementation in commercial settings with diverse world configurations and platform constraints remains challenging. We present Navigation Pixie, an on-demand navigation agent employing a loosely coupled architecture that integrates structured spatial metadata with LLM-based natural language processing while minimizing platform dependencies, which enables experiments on the extensive user base of commercial metaverse platforms. Our cross-platform experiments on commercial metaverse platform Cluster with 99 PC client and 94 VR-HMD participants demonstrated that Navigation Pixie significantly increased dwell time and free exploration compared to fixed-route and no-agent conditions across both platforms. Subjective evaluations revealed consistent on-demand preferences in PC environments versus context-dependent social perception advantages in VR-HMD. This research contributes to advancing VR interaction design through conversational spatial navigation agents, establishes cross-platform evaluation methodologies revealing environment-dependent effectiveness, and demonstrates empirical experimentation frameworks for commercial metaverse platforms.

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