In this paper, a method to control the movement of a mouse pointer using simple hand gestures and a webcam is proposed. A real-time tracking algorithm is implemented based on adaptive skin detection and motion analysis. Using the history of motion, the trajectory of the movement of the hand is drawn and then used to identify a gesture. A region of interest algorithm is proposed, in order to scale the motion when the user is located far away from the point of capture. The motion of the mouse pointer is scaled accordingly. Demonstrations using our prototype clearly illustrate the benefits of our system.