Navigation Pixie: Implementation and Empirical Study Toward On-demand Navigation Agents in Commercial Metaverse
Year: 2025
Type: preprint
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.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Language: English
Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6966835864
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: