VW also unveiled plans for self-parking cars, building on a similar announcement by Volvo in 2013, whereby your car automatically drives off (you don’t need to be inside) to find a parking space. After you’ve finished whatever it was you needed to do, you can then call your car back to your location via the obligatory smartphone app. Such an idea may seem rather fanciful, but in a decade it may come as standard with many car models.

Your HD TV is already out of date

Finally, in the home it looks as though 2015 may be the year that Ultra-high-definition (UHTV) goes mainstream. The technology has been around for a while, but in many cases it has struggled to make it into the living room.

Sometimes referred to as 4K, the picture it offers is four times as sharp as standard high definition. But take-up has been slow due to an age-old conundrum: manufacturers won’t mass produce affordable sets until they believe that there’s enough 4K content for viewers to enjoy, and media producers won’t shoot – or distribute – in that format until they determine that there is a critical mass of devices capable of watching it on.

In the future we may determine that 2015 was the tipping point for both parties.

Attendees at CES reported seeing plenty of 4K HDTVs, computer monitors, and cameras this year; whilst YouTube announced that it now has 26 partners showing 4K standard content as standard. And as broadband connections get faster, and more households migrate to fibre connections, you can expect to see more programmes like House of Cards in 4K, as companies like Netflix will increasingly distribute shows in that format.

As for the industry itself, attention is already beginning to focus on 8K. I was fortunate enough to see a demo in Amsterdam last September, and it will be shown for the first time in the region at the inaugural IBC MENA Conference and Exhibition which was held in Dubai at the end of last month. The picture is discernibly sharper, perhaps too sharp for some but, as CES consistently shows, technology marches to its own beat. And you’re often helpless to stop it.

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