Gesture recognition becomes feasible even for real-time applications and offers therefore a wide range of new capabilities for novel approaches of human computer interaction, but also for many multi-media services. In this paper, we present a real-time solution for gesture recognition applied in a novel avatar animation videocommunication service. We focus on user friendliness, robustness and easy usage. Hence, the algorithm does not require any training or adaptation to a specific user and can be applied in arbitrary unconstrained environment.