Abstract Researchers have made significant strides in developing recognition techniques for surface sketches, with realized and potential applications to motivate extending these techniques towards analogous surfaceless sketches. Yet surface sketch recognition techniques remain largely untested in surfaceless environments and are still highly constrained for related surfaceless gesture recognition techniques. The focus of the research is to investigate the performance of surface sketch recognition techniques in more challenging surfaceless environments, with the aim of addressing existing limitations through improved surfaceless sketch recognition techniques.