Hand gesture recognition

That is one topic that I can never get tired of researching. I have always dreamed of controlling my computer by just moving my hand in front of the web cam. The thing is, I can never understand the Math behind it.

I have been doing quite a lot of googling and researching lately, but the sad thing is, all of these sites gave me all these crap. Do I need to know all those weird and scary looking formulas just to detect a hand? Come on, all I want is to extract the hand from the picture, that's all I want to know from now.

Image processing is not my favourite thing, but to recognise hand gestures, I'm gonna have to use it. Still, even if I can extract out the parts of the images with my skin colour, I still don't know how to identify which "skin pixels" belong to the hand, and which belong to the head, and so on. Sigh... anyway, I'm going back to googling some more.