What is the current state of hand gesture recognition in OpenCV?
I have seen great examples of being able to detect hand gestures (e.g. https://www.andol.me/1661/) b
I think the only support in OpenCV for hand gesture recognition is exactly what Luca Del Tongo demonstrated in the video you linked to, namely cvConvexityDefects().
You might want to extract the hand mask using color-space filtering (as suggested in the video), and using ML classifiers for detecting the actual gesture. There have been several papers that have done this, though this is not currently implemented as-such in OpenCV.
cvConvexityDefects() is the key step following the hand segmentation as done in andol.info/hci/1661.htm