LAS VEGAS: The world’s largest consumer electronics trade show will officially open here on Monday, with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates heralding the onset of a new “digital decade”.

The Consumer Electronics Show features for the first time a “Sustainable TechZone” dedicated to “pioneering technologies that benefit the environment and sustainability of the global economy.”

Innovations in the TechZone will include voltaic solar-power generating backpacks and messenger bags made from recycled plastic soda bottles.

Control4 and other firms specialising in automating homes will display computerised systems that reduce the amount of energy wasted in cooling, heating or lighting residences or by televisions and other entertainment electronics.

In his last keynote speech on Sunday, Gates predicted the coming 10 years will deliver great technological changes.

“The first digital decade has been a great success,” Gates said at the Venetian hotel and casino.

“This is just the beginning. There is nothing holding us back from going much faster and further in the second digital decade.”

There are more than a billion personal computers in use in the world and more than 40 per cent of people on the planet have mobile telephones, according to Gates.

The new digital decade will be increasingly “user-centric” and the trend is for media and entertainment to be software driven, Gates said.

“The second digital decade will be more focused on connecting people,” he continued. “Those applications will run on the Internet, in the cloud as we say, and use the best of software services.”

Gates said high-definition video experiences “will be everywhere,” from televisions to wall projections and even built into desks or tables.

Electronics will be increasingly linked to the degree that people will eventually take for granted getting their data whenever and where ever they want, according to Gates.

While the first digital decade was marked by the keyboard and the computer mouse, the new decade will be marked by “natural user interfaces” such as touch screens and gesture controls, according to Gates.

Electronics makers vying for the CES spotlight will tout new products and resort to the time-proven tactic of bringing in actors, musicians, magicians, comedians or sports stars.

The event offers a vault of high-tech marvels from the last in flat-panel television sets and mobile telephones to computer controlled homes and cars.—AFP