Understanding Organizational Strategies Across Multimodal Artifacts in Immersive Computational Notebooks

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.