I really think that it was a cool hack by William Walter Wu. When I first saw it I was expecting it to use Leap Motion[1], which made into HN's first page a few days ago[2].
Getting Leap Motion integrated with Chrome would be amazing, because, you are right, the webcam alone does not seem to be precise enough, as the author said:
It took me a while to write and fine tune the detection algorithms. Even then, the algorithms are only about 80% accurate
Getting Leap Motion integrated with Chrome would be amazing, because, you are right, the webcam alone does not seem to be precise enough, as the author said:
It took me a while to write and fine tune the detection algorithms. Even then, the algorithms are only about 80% accurate
[1] https://www.leapmotion.com/
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5179335 and was not the first time:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4250536
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170446