Most “busy-hands” interface research has focused on microgestures — small finger movements layered onto whatever a hand is already doing. That falls apart the moment a stable grasp actually matters: holding something fragile, heavy, or precision-shaped, where any extra finger motion risks dropping or crushing it. A new study from researchers Anand Kumar and Aditya Shekhar Nittala, GraspPressure, tests a different modality for exactly that gap: pressure-based selection that requires no change in finger pose at all.
Across two within-subject experiments, the team measured how reliably people could perform controlled pressure selections while holding objects of different shapes and grip types, and how finger-specific performance varied across those conditions. The headline numbers: 92.7% average success rate, at 1.74 seconds average selection time — reliable enough, the authors argue, to function as a genuine complementary input channel rather than a novelty.
This is a direct, practically-scoped answer for anyone designing wearables or tools meant to be operated mid-task — a camera rig held with both hands, a soldering iron, a prop on stage — where a microgesture interface was never going to work in the first place. The paper is an unreviewed preprint, accepted to appear in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction and set to be presented at ACM ISS 2026 (Interactive Surfaces and Spaces) in Turin, Italy, 23–26 November 2026.