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In this paper, we present a realistic avatar called e-Shadow. This avatar is a virtual shadow of a user and facial animations are injected into the head position as response to the user's gestures. We adopt background subtraction method to separate the user's shape from the background scene and combine several image processing methods in order to reduce noise. A heuristic algorithm for tracking positions of head and hands is proposed to detect predefined user's gestures. Because e-Shadow assumes everyday indoor lighting, casual camera, and small desktop, it can be directly incorporated with video chatting programs as a realistic avatar and the presented detection method might be applied to the applications of real-time interactive media art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]