VROOM: Evaluating Role-Based Collaboration for Immersive Ontology Manipulation

An ontology is a structured representation of knowledge that organizes domain-specific concepts and their relationships. As ontologies scale, visualizing and manipulating them using traditional two-dimensional interfaces becomes increasingly challenging due to visual clutter and structural complexity. To address this, we developed a multi-user immersive ontology manipulation system that enables interaction with ontological structures in a three-dimensional space. This work-in-progress study adopts a usability and experience-focused perspective to examine how users navigate, coordinate, and perform ontology-related tasks in a shared immersive setting. We conducted an exploratory user study using qualitative and observational methods, in which participants completed visualization and authoring tasks in co-present, multi-user Virtual Reality (VR). Our analysis focuses on user strategies, interaction patterns, and breakdowns observed during task execution, supported by analysis of audio transcripts. Preliminary findings highlight challenges in spatial orientation, object visibility, and awareness of collaborators, as well as emergent collaborative behaviors, including role adaptation, peer support, and shared task planning. Participants also reported a strong sense of co-presence and engagement in the shared environment. These early results provide insights into the opportunities and limitations of immersive VR for collaborative knowledge work, and inform future directions for interaction design and evaluation in collaborative immersive analytics systems.