The consumer electronics show is the world’s leading technology platform for emerging technologies. This is the place to be if you want to show off your inventions successfully. It is a place where global technology leaders mingle with new technology developers, and everyone attracts a crowd. There will be many treats presented to us in this 51st year of CES. What we expect to see includes:

1. Voice Assistant
With companies like Google and Amazon, where virtual assistants are the next generation of human interface with machines, third-party apps that enhance the performance of the human-machine integration will be picked up quickly. We expect to see a number of accomplished voice assistant applications being successful this year.

2. City planning software
The future of inner city development will be around the smart city infrastructure. This means that transportation, energy, waste disposal and recycling, security, and lighting will all be interlinked in a citywide controlled substrate. Applications that will link the city dweller to the city, automating access and payment to every sector are already growing in number.

3. Sports
With the development of new materials and technologies that supplement athletes, we expect to see some new performance-enhancing technologies including sensors, VR, and apps to improve training performance, as well as real-time interfaces for on the spot action updates.

4. Robotics
Robots are split into two sectors, the industrial ones that are highly useful and continue to evolve into more accurate, fast and efficient models and the home appliance or human interface robots that are more of a novelty. The domain of “I robot” will take a few more years to be realized.

5. Autonomous Vehicles (AV)
We expect this to be a show stopper as the race for the driverless car has generated hundreds of billions of dollars in venture capital finance. Car manufacturers, AV tech companies, and gig economies are all vying for first fully automated driverless cars. Where there are big money and competition, we always find big steps in technology.

6. Weird and Wonderful
There will be this year’s fair share of unusual concepts, some literally in the “bad” section, while others so far out that there is still no way to integrate them into society without being under the influence of awareness changing substances. Having stated this, sometimes the so far out becomes the most popular, such as the phone, the TV and other first time developments that changed the world.