Georgia Tech has had an ongoing project for ASL recognition using gloves. They've since upgraded to a Kinect though. Seems to work pretty well. http://kinecthacks.net/american-sign-language-recognition-us...

There is one deaf researcher I know of that is working on ASL recognition. http://research.gallaudet.edu/~cvogler/research/

FWIW, my grad studies were in computer vision but I'm more interested in multimedia and protocols these days.