CrossY --- A crossing-based drawing application

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Overview

CrossY won the "Best Paper Award"
at the Seventeenth Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2004) in Santa Fe, NM. Imagine you are using a computer with a pen as input device. You will soon realize that point-and-click can be frustrating, so why not change the interaction method Instead of point-and-click we use crossing as interaction method. To trigger an action a target is crossed instead of clicked on. While the idea of crossing has been around for a while, there has been no complete implementation of an application so far. We introduce CrossY, a simple drawing application developed as a benchmark to demonstrate the feasibility of goal crossing as the basis for a graphical user interface. We show that crossing is not only as expressive as the current point-and-click interface, but also offers more flexibility in interaction design. In particular, crossing encourages the fluid composition of commands which supports the development of more fluid interfaces. While crossing was previously identified as a potential substitute for the classic point-and-click interaction, this work is the first to report on the practical aspects of implementing an interface based on goal crossing as the fundamental building block.

Participants

Georg Apitz, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
François Guimbretière, Assistant Professor, Computer Science

downloads

the movie (26 MB, quicktime format)
slides of the presentation at UIST 2004 (pdf, (2.1 MB)

application

the executable requires .net (version 1.1) installed or your machine, if you don't have it you can download it here:
.net as of 22/6/2005 (22 MB, zipped)
or directly from Microsoft here.

Then you can download the application and install it.
the application with installer and instructions (0.5 MB, zipped)

Related Publications

Apitz, G. and Guimbretière, F. (Oct. 2004)
CrossY: A Crossing-Based Drawing Application
Proceedings of Seventeenth Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, October 2004

Apitz, G. and Guimbretière, F. (Jul. 2005)

Abstract of: CrossY: A Crossing-Based Drawing Application

International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), July 2005.