Usability and User Advocacy of a Digital Twin-Inspired Metaverse Orientation System: An Exploratory Pilot Study

University orientation programmes are a primary mechanism through which new students become familiar with campus facilities, academic spaces, and institutional procedures. However, many orientation activities are delivered as single in-person sessions, limiting opportunities for students to revisit spatial and procedural information after the event. To help address this constraint, a digital twin-inspired metaverse orientation application, the Digital Twin Metaverse Orientation (DTMO), was designed in Unity and hosted on Spatial.io as a spatially faithful virtual replica of a faculty environment. An exploratory pilot evaluation was conducted with 30 university students from multiple faculties after a facilitator-guided orientation session. The System Usability Scale (SUS), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and two open-ended questions were used to examine perceived usability, recommendation intention, and the reasons underpinning recommendation decisions. The application obtained a mean SUS score of 86.83, corresponding to an excellent perceived-usability rating, and an NPS of 53.33, indicating positive immediate recommendation intention. Qualitative responses suggested that participants valued the DTMO for engagement, accessibility, ease of navigation, and support for spatial familiarisation, while some participants emphasised that it should complement rather than replace physical orientation. These pilot findings indicate promising user reception in a small, guided-session sample, but they do not establish orientation effectiveness, learning transfer, wayfinding performance, retention, belonging, institutional integration, or sustained use. Further research with broader samples and outcome-based measures is therefore needed.