Hand Gesture Control System

Well needless to say I'm a huge Isaac Asimov fan and while there have always been things in his books that have intrigue me one of the inventions that most stood out in my mind was the way they controlled the robots in his robot series. In the book one of the characters would make a specific hand gesture and it would mean a specific function the robot was to preform. In the book this was achieved by the hand being placed in an electronic field and the distortion caused by the hand gesture would activate the function, this seems a little out of my league so I thought I would use a camera with some kind of recognition features programed into it. Hopefully I will actually make this instead of just leaving it as an idea.