# PalmSpace: Towards a Versatile On-Palm Interaction Space through Unified Touch Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10370 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10370/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [MediaPipe Hands: On-device Real-time Hand Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10214/) (2020)
- [A High-Level Description and Performance Evaluation of Pupil Invisible](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00508/) (2020)
- [WristPP: A Wrist-Worn System for Hand Pose And Pressure Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00606/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As smart glasses and lightweight MR devices become increasingly practical, input remains a key challenge. The bare palm is an always-available, tactile, and proprioceptively accessible surface, but it has neither an explicit coordinate system nor embedded touch sensing. Prior on-palm systems typically expose isolated touch events, discrete regions, continuous trajectories, or task-specific gestures, limiting the palm's ability to support precise selection and gesture manipulation through a common input representation. We present PalmSpace, a wrist-worn infrared system that exposes mode-aware, body-referenced absolute input on the bare palm without per-user sensing calibration. At the interaction level, PalmSpace jointly represents contact occurrence, interaction mode, and palm-referenced absolute location; at the model level, it learns these coupled outputs through a shared real-time representation. In leave-one-participant-out evaluation with 17 participants, PalmSpace achieved 6.7 mm mean localization error, 98.9% contact detection accuracy, and 96.7% F1 for four-class interaction-state recognition. User studies further demonstrated absolute pointing and dragging, eyes-free digit input, and representative multi-finger controls including scrolling and pinch-based map manipulation. These results show that a morphologically variable bare palm can function as a transferable, mode-aware interaction surface.