1. A method for enabling interaction with video based characters or objects in an interactive imaging environment comprising: using an imaging system to perform the steps of: capturing a corpus of interaction data; processing the captured video using a segmentation process, wherein the segmentation process corresponds to a captured setup in order to generate a plurality of binary video data, wherein the binary video data comprises silhouette motion data; labeling the corpus of shadow interaction data by assigning a description to the silhouette motion data; processing the labeled silhouette motion data to extract horizontal and vertical projection histograms for each frame of the silhouette motion data; and estimating a motion state automatically from each frame of segmentation data using the processed and labeled silhouette motion data.