Crossets: manipulating multiple sliders by crossing

Crossets are new interactive instruments or widgets based on crossing gestures that exploit the dimension orthogonal to sliders’ axes for manipulating multiple aligned sliders simultaneously. We propose a Crossets taxonomy to generalize the sliders’ properties to those of other standard widgets. We introduce and illustrate the constrained crossing gesture with Crossets in an interface for the visual exploration of numerical tables. Then, we discuss alternative strategies to Crossets before exploring persistent unconstrained crossing gestures compatible with Crossets, introducing Spline as a persistent reusable interactive instrument. This paper highlights promising perspectives for crossing-based widgets. We hope future interfaces will make use of this simple technique that can help improve the efficiency of standard widgets and lead to the generation of new styles of interfaces.