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arXiv · 2508.03216

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

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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Hikari Yanagawa, Yuichi Hiroi, Satomi Tokida, Yuji Hatada, Takefumi Hiraki. 2025-08-05. Navigation Pixie: Implementation and Empirical Study Toward On-demand Navigation Agents in Commercial Metaverse. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03216

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