GraspPressure: Understanding Pressure Input With Busy Hands

Abstract

In many real-world scenarios, users interact with digital systems while their hands are partially occupied, such as when holding tools or everyday objects. Prior work on busy-hand interaction has focused on microgestures and motion-based techniques, which rely on finger articulation or relative movement. In situations where a stable grasp is required, such as handling fragile, heavy, or precision objects, such motion can be undesirable or impractical. Pressure-based input offers a complementary modality that enables interaction without changing finger pose, yet its use while holding objects has received limited empirical attention. To explore this, we conducted two within-subject experiments examining users' ability to perform controlled pressure selections and analyzing finger-specific performance across different grasps and geometries. Results indicate that participants can reliably perform pressure-based selections in these conditions, achieving high success rates (92.7% on average) with low selection times (1.74s on average). Our findings characterize the potential of pressure input as a complementary microinteraction modality under grasp-constrained, busy-hand scenarios.