If everything that was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show last week comes together, in five years or so we'll be watching 3-D YouTube videos on paper-thin screens controlled by waving our hands in mid-air.

Unfortunately, no one yet is actually putting all those pieces together. But I could see how future TVs might turn out as I trekked around the show floor. Here's what I ran into:

Razor thin and razor sharp

I've rarely been awestruck by any TV technology. But organic light-emitting diode (O.L.E.D.) TVs are different. The first stunner is that the TVs are about the width of a Pop-Tart—significantly thinner than any flat-screen TV today. But then the picture is mind-blowing—like a moving high-resolution photo. You really have to see it to believe it. LG, Sony, and others are developing O.L.E.D. TVs. Today, even a seven-inch screen costs $1,000 or more, but the technology will come down in price over the coming years.

Wii-like controls

Ever since Nintendo's Wii took off, companies have been pushing toward making TV controllers that work using hand motions or that act like a wireless computer mouse. Some of the more radical versions try to get rid of a remote device completely. Hitachi showed a TV connected to a Canesta camera that can sense how a hand moves through space. This lets you change a channel with a gesture. I'm wondering if you can program it to use whatever gesture you want. Could make watching TV with your friends interesting.

3-D vision

The race is on to create viable 3-D home television. Sony, LG, and Panasonic are all giving it a go. It really works, but still faces major hurdles. Like, you have to wear these plastic glasses that make the 3-D pop but distort other objects you look at. That might be a problem if you're multitasking while watching TV and wind up diapering the dog instead of the baby.

Net TV

Every major electronics maker showed some way to bring at least some internet-based content into the television set. LG has a flat-screen TV that can directly download Netflix movies without a separate box. Kodak showed me a box that lets your TV pull in YouTube videos, or home videos stored on a laptop somewhere else in the house. Microsoft continues to push its vision of a seamless connection between TVs, PCs, and cell phones, so video can be found, shared, and viewed on any of them. The convergence of the Net and TV is arriving right about now.

TVs everywhere

Toward the end of the show, I wandered through a remote part of the floor, where dozens of little-known Chinese manufacturers set up tiny booths. Many of them showed cheap, flat-screen TVs the size of a picture frame. These things are going to become commodities, so people could have small video screens just about everywhere, all fed by a home's wireless network. That could change TV viewing from something everyone in the house does in the family room, to something each person does alone wherever they happen to be.

Oh, for what it's worth, no one I ran into at C.E.S. was the least bit excited about Blu-ray disks. The technology for delivering movies will most likely leap directly from DVDs to high-def downloads over Internet or cable systems. Blu-ray doesn't seem like part of the future—more like a soon-to-be historical footnote.