Understanding Organizational Strategies Across Multimodal Artifacts in Immersive Computational Notebooks

2026-08-04

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of systematic understanding regarding how analysts organize the spatial relationships among multimodal artifacts—such as code, narrative text, data tables, and visualizations—in immersive computational notebooks. Through a user study, it presents the first systematic analysis of spatial layout strategies employed in immersive environments, integrating an Immersive Computational Notebook (ICoN), spatial layout analysis, and multimodal interaction techniques. The findings reveal that users consistently adopt depth-based layouts and construct hierarchical spatial structures centered around cell-based artifacts. This insight transcends prior work limited to single-modality artifacts, offering empirical grounding and actionable design implications for the development of immersive analytical environments.

Abstract

Immersive Computational Notebooks (ICoN) extend traditional notebook environments into immersive spaces, enabling analysts to interact with multimodal artifacts, including code, narratives, data tables, and visualizations. By integrating multimodal artifacts into a single immersive workspace, ICoN enables analysts to transition between analytical tasks seamlessly. Meanwhile, understanding organizational strategies is critical for designing effective interactions to further support analysts. However, prior research on immersive computational notebooks has primarily examined organizational strategies centered on single-modality artifacts. Systematic investigations of how analysts spatially organize the complex relationships among multimodal artifacts in a single immersive workspace remain underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted a user study to examine organizational strategies for multimodal artifacts in immersive computational notebooks. Our findings show that participants predominantly adopted depth-based layouts, and their spatial organization was largely structured around cell-based artifacts.

Problem

• Immersive Computational Notebooks
• multimodal artifacts
• organizational strategies
• spatial organization

Innovation

• Immersive Computational Notebooks
• Multimodal Artifacts
• Spatial Organization
• Depth-based Layout
• Cell-based Artifacts