I just wanted to mention that earlier today I finally got hand tracking working on my final project for my Motion Capture / Computer Vision class. You can now connect a webcam to your computer, load up my GTK+ program, and watch boxes with crosshairs follow your hands accurately as you move them across the screen.
Pretty awesome, no? Check out the project if you haven’t yet, its MoinMoin wiki is here. I might post up a video of it in action soon.
It uses a clever skintone detection algorithm across the RGB colorspace, along with clever segmentation of the regions of interest to determine the cardinal direction a hand is moving in and retargeting the box to the new area and running the algorithm again. I am quite happy with the results. It can only get better, but it’s already pretty fun to play with.