In the microscopic world, optical trapping is a potent tool for achieving precise and noninvasive manipulation of small objects, which is marked by Nobel Prizes in 1997 and 2018 for wide applications in vacuum and liquids. This session provides several invited talks about optical trapping and manipulation in vacuum and liquids, and their unique applications such as weak force detection, biochemical sensing and rotation control. Conventional optical tweezers are ineffective for objects on contact-friction interfaces, because of the huge scale gap between optical forces and interfacial adsorption or friction. In this session, a more recently reported work on photothermal shock tweezers that rely on thermal gradient force traps is provided, and its application of nano-conventional robots on dry solid substrates.