The invention relates to a robust method to control interactive media using gestures. A method of controlling a multimedia device, using face detection and (hot spot) motion, providing robust accuracy in issued commands, wherein the method involves the following steps: extracting a hot spot area using a current captured image (Ci), calculate and analyze the difference between the current captured image (Ci) and a previous captured image (Ci−1), resulting in Di, applying an erosion on the Di to remove small areas, applying extracted (hot spot) motion areas as masks to filter out non-hot spot area motion, add Di to build a motion image, find the largest x, y and the smallest x, y coordinates of all the detected motion connected components, denote each as Ix, Iy, sx and sy, and perform an algorithm to determine if a hand gesture represents a command to control a multimedia device.