arXiv subjects

Yuji Hatada

Publications and source records attributed to Yuji Hatada.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Punchlines Unbound: Comedy Practices in Social Virtual Reality

Social VR platforms serve as an emergent venue for live performance, enabling co-presence and real-time interaction among distributed performers and audiences within shared virtual environments. Live performances, such as comedy, rely on subtle social cues between performers and audiences, which are missing in VR. However, it remains unclear how comedians utilize avatar-mediated cues in social VR. We conducted semi-structured interviews and observations with 23 virtual comedians on VRChat. Results revealed that virtual comedians transformed their limited nonverbal expressiveness into performative opportunities through intentional control and exaggeration. Additionally, a distinctive culture emerged around context-appropriate emoji reactions from audiences, while challenges such as audio latency and moderation against trolling were highlighted. Our findings advance understanding of how performers creatively adapt to expressive constraints in avatar-mediated settings. We further demonstrate how challenges in performer-audience interaction and moderation provide design insights for systems enhancing feedback visibility and sustain community norms without restricting creative expression.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Understanding Collaboration between Professional Designers and Decision-making AI: A Case Study in the Workplace

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has fundamentally transformed creative work practices in the design industry. Existing studies have identified both opportunities and challenges for creative practitioners in their collaboration with generative AI and explored ways to facilitate effective human-AI co-creation. However, there is still a limited understanding of designers' collaboration with AI that supports creative processes distinct from generative AI. To address these gaps, this study focuses on understanding designers' collaboration with decision-making AI, which supports the convergence process in the creative workflow, as opposed to the divergent process supported by generative AI. Specifically, we conducted a case study at an online advertising design company to explore how professional graphic designers at the company perceive the impact of decision-making AI on their creative work practices. The case company incorporated an AI system that predicts the effectiveness of advertising design into the design workflow as a decision-making support tool. Findings from interviews with 12 designers identified how designers trust and rely on AI, its perceived benefits and challenges, and their strategies for navigating the challenges. Based on the findings, we discuss design recommendations for integrating decision-making AI into the creative design workflow.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

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

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.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Cross-Reality Lifestyle: Integrating Physical and Virtual Lives through Multi-Platform Metaverse

Technological advances are redefining the relationship between physical and virtual spaces. Traditionally, when users engage in virtual reality, they are completely cutoff from the physical space. Similarly, they are unable to access virtual experiences while engaged in physical activities. However, modern multiplatform metaverse environments allow simultaneous participation through mobile devices, creating new opportunities for integrated experiences. This study introduces the concept of "cross-reality lifestyles" to examine how users actively combine their physical and virtual activities. We identify three patterns of integration: first, Amplification: one space enhances experiences in the other; second, Complementary: spaces offer different but equally valuable alternatives, and third, Emergence: simultaneous engagement creates entirely new experiences. We propose the ACE cube framework that analyzes these patterns as continuous characteristics, and by integrating this analysis with technical requirements of commercial platforms, we provide practical guidelines for platform selection, technical investment prioritization, and cross-reality application development.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

LUIDA: Large-scale Unified Infrastructure for Digital Assessments based on Commercial Metaverse Platform

Online experiments using metaverse platforms have gained significant traction in Human-Computer Interaction and Virtual Reality (VR) research. However, current research workflows are highly fragmented, as researchers must use separate tools for system implementation, participant recruitment, experiment execution, and data collection, reducing consistency and increasing workload. We present LUIDA (Large-scale Unified Infrastructure for Digital Assessments), a metaverse-based framework that integrates these fragmented processes. LUIDA automatically allocates interconnected virtual environments for parallel experiment execution and provides implementation templates adaptable to various VR research domains, requiring minimal metaverse development expertise. Our evaluation included two studies using a prototype built on Cluster, the commercial metaverse platform. First, VR researchers using LUIDA to develop and run experiments reported high usability scores (SUS: 73.75) and moderate workload (NASA-TLX: 24.11) for overall usage, with interviews confirming streamlined workflows compared to traditional laboratory experiments. Second, we conducted three replicated experiments with public Cluster users, each recruiting approximately 200 participants within one week. These experiments produced results that closely matched the original studies, validating the experimental integrity of LUIDA across research domains. After technical refinements, we plan to release LUIDA as an open platform, providing a standardized protocol to improve research efficiency and experimental reproducibility in VR studies.

cs.HC↗