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This can be alleviated by using a camera with a shallow depth of field so that the hand is in sharp focus but a few inches back is totally out of focus. He will not be able to do that with a laptop cam however, but he might get away with a webcam with a manual focus ring if he is far enough away.

To do this without any sort of structure around it is really tough, computers are still way behind where humans are in terms of object recognition. There are a couple of main approaches that I can see: 1. create a depth field using a 3D Imaging technique ala Kinect. This is the approach that many take as the hand will then stand out from the background and be distinguishable. 2. Single camera object tracking. The vision module has some pretty good object tracking algorithms included in it now. One of my colleagues has been playing and managed to get it to track his eyes. The proble. With this will be identifying the object in the first place, the hand, and it staying consistent enough. This would also require whole hand gestures, it is unlikely to be able to pick up finger movements. I suspect a scheme similar to this is what the new Samsung interfaces uses, although that appears to pick up some elements of hand changes. I hope that helps, there maybe more schemes out there but these are the two that I am aware of. James