Today in Las Vegas, 130,000 people will decide your future.

These arbiters of the digital age are, of course, delegates of the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show, an annual gadget jamboree that has become the largest gathering of its kind anywhere in the world – and the closest you can get to forward time travel.

This was the event, after all, where the videocassette recorder, or VCR, was first unveiled to an awestruck public in 1970. Likewise, the compact disc player made its debut at CES in 1981; high-definition television was revealed in 1998; and in 2001, Microsoft launched the now-ubiquitous Xbox video games console.

The technology unveiled at CES – which was first held in New York in 1967 – has not only changed our lives, but also made vast sums of money for the companies involved in the manufacturing and selling of it. This year, sales of consumer electronics in the United States alone are expected to top $135 billion.

For those who make the annual pilgrimage to CES (and there is definitely something religious about the event), the thrill of being ‘ahead of the curve’ beats the traffic gridlock, the pricey hotel rooms and the long queues. Indeed, CES is now so big that the infrastructure of Las Vegas can barely handle it.

This year, the show boasts 2,500 exhibitors, covering 1.5 million square feet of space. When delegates arrive from more than 110 different countries, they are handed a book of exhibitors that is the size of the New York City telephone directory. Soon, CES will not need a host city, but a host planet.

The show began yesterday and Las Vegas inevitably ground to a halt. The Times’s 40-minute flight from Burbank (in Los Angeles) to Las Vegas took three hours, largely because of all the private jets hogging the runway. Anyone who is anyone in the movies, music, television, advertising, marketing or the internet simply has to be at CES, and many of them fly from Burbank, which is the closest airport to the movie studios.

At Las Vegas airport, the queue for taxis was two-hours long, and the queue for limos was not much shorter.

The event itself is held at the Las Vegas Conference Center, which resembles a cross between the Glastonbury music festival and an Oxford Street Dixons outlet on Christmas Eve – but on a scale that can barely be comprehended by man. And man is the right word, judging by the testosterone levels of the crowd (not including the female PRs).

The Las Vegas pimps who stand on Paradise Road, handing out fliers for ‘girls, directly to your room,’ were doing a brisk business yesterday.

There is an unashamedly geeky element to the CES crowd, demonstrated by the treatment technology executives as rock stars. "The crowd went wild for Bill Gates, but when Justin Timberlake came on stage, people just ignored him, or slow clapped," remarked one female delegate, who attended Mr Gates's pre-show speech on Wednesday.

So what will be the must-have gadget of 2006 – the shiny little box that will change all our lives? You can see The Times's selection in the newspaper tomorrow but industry observers are already predicting that this year will see more evolution than revolution.

"Every TV set, set-top box, cell phone will have an internet connection," said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies in California. "If every device is connected to the internet, it requires a different way of thinking about how to create products and how consumers use products."

Gadgets that allow home devices such as lights and central heating system to be controlled remotely over the internet are getting cheaper, better, and more reliable, as are digital home projectors (a more extreme alternative to a flat screen television) and satellite radio receivers. All will be on display at CES.

Satellite radio, which offers commercial-free radio for a monthly subscription, has already proved to be a surprising hit in America and the timing with CES could not be better: Howard Stern, the hugely popular ‘shock jock’, launches his new radio show on Sirius satellite radio on Monday.

The DJ, known for his lewd humour and defiance against censorship, has already met targets for attracting subscribers to Sirius, triggering an astonishing $219 million stock bonus. Adverts for his show are currently plastered all over Sin City. "The gloves are coming off," says one. "And maybe some tops."

As for progress on the fight over next-generation DVD formats, CES is unlikely to provide much progress. The companies behind the competing, non-compatible formats – HD DVD and Blu-ray – have both said that their hardware will be available as early as spring.

Meanwhile, Apple Computer, which arguably invented the most important gadget of recent times – the iPod music player – it is likely to stay quiet for much of CES. It will hold its own conference on future technologies in San Francisco next week.

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