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This time next year life will be very different. Televisions, computers, music players and mobile phones will have merged into seamless, wireless networks that beam information to video visors and impossibly slim pocket displays.

A couple of years later computers will start responding to voice and gesture instead of mouse and keyboard, and websites will develop into interactive 3-D worlds. In the real world cars will begin to drive themselves while their masters sit back, relax and slip on a pair of video glasses.

That, at least, is the collective vision of the 140,000 technology insiders who gathered this week in Las Vegas to map out our future. In truth, predictions like these have been made for years within the technology industry, but the pieces were at last beginning to fall into place at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

“We’re at a historic point in the development of technology,” Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the company that runs the show, said. “We’re shifting digital content around the home, going wireless and shifting content from the home to the car.”

General Motors and Carnegie Mellon University demonstrated a working prototype of a driverless car that can navigate its way through bustling streets. It uses more than a dozen cameras, lasers and radar guns to assess the position and speed of other road users, and feeds that information through half a million lines of computer code. The result is a car that drives assertively through junctions when it senses a gap in traffic, but pulls up sharply if someone jumps a red light.

“Some people might think that is pretty futuristic but we’re already seeing a trend in that direction,” Larry Burns, of General Motors, said. “Look at cruise control, where you’re letting the car control the speed. The next step is adaptive cruise control, where it’s adapting the speed according to the distance from the car in front.”

This step-by-step advance is typical of many technologies on display at this year’s show, where incremental improvements to speed, sharpness and sleekness outnumbered all-new devices. Television-makers continue to produce larger, slimmer screens. Panasonic won the size battle with a prototype 150in plasma screen.

Size is not everything, however. Sony’s stand included 11in TVs that were 3mm (1/8in) thick, a feat of miniaturisation made possible by the use of organic light emitting diodes instead of LCD or plasma screens. The OLED TVs have just gone on sale in the US for $2,500 (£1,250) and will soon be available in Britain.

Less eye-catching but potentially more significant were advances in the world of cables and wireless networks. Several ways of linking televisions were on show, each capable of sending a high-definition signal from a single satellite, cable or Freeview box to every TV in the house. Cable-free ultrawideband technology will transmit video, music and images at up to 500 megabits per second, 250 times the speed of a standard broadband connection. That will help to liberate web-based video from the computer. With video no longer tied to the TV or the computer, it can begin to spread farther afield. Video glasses have long been a staple of science fiction, but the technology is quickly approaching maturity. One reason for its importance is that it neatly solves one of the trickiest problems facing mobile television – a mobile screen that is big enough to be watchable isn’t really mobile.

Video goggles sidestep the problem by putting the screen so close to the eye that the brain interprets the image as being bigger than it really is. The only problem was that until recently the people wearing them looked as if they had just stepped off the set of Star Trek. Some of the better sets are now quite discreet and at next year’s show they will no doubt be slimmer still. By then, of course, this year’s vision of the future will be ancient history.

Vision things

Lumus video glasses
Tiny projectors concealed in the frames, above, beam an image on to the lens. They fool the brain into thinking that the picture is being projected on to whatever the wearer is facing
Available: by end of the year
Price: £150-£250

Sony Rolly
A pointless but engaging MP3 player that dances to the music
Available: spring in US; European launch tbc
Price: tbc

iRobot Looj
Domestic robot that cleans gutters
Available: now
Price: £50-£80

iShoes
Impractical, unstable and pricey, they deserve a mention for their wilful disregard for commonsense. These motorised roller skates have a top speed of 13.5mph
Available: www.theishoes.com
Price: £300

Still waiting for...

The flying automobile
Henry Ford’s cars may have conquered the world but he imagined that the sky would be filled with his creations as well. In 1940 he said: “Mark my word, a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile but it will come”

Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners
Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp, told The New York Times in 1955: “Self-operating [vacuum] cleaners powered by nuclear energy will probably be a reality a decade from now”

Migrating homes
Arthur C. Clarke wrote in Vogue in 1966 that houses would fly by 2001. He predicted that entire communities would head south for the winter like a pack of birds

Sources: Times database, wired.com

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