With hundreds of new product launches and an annual industry reunion, CES brings out the fortune-teller (oops, I mean analyst) in all of us. The economy has forced companies to tone down big risk-taking schemes, but there’s still plenty to talk about, even if some of it comes with a lower price tag.

My bets on some of the hottest trends at the show:

eBook Wars: You’ll have seen most of them before the opening day of CES, but you’re going to begin to see a features war over book readers. Color readers, readers with two screens, readers with backlit screens, pocket readers, multimedia readers, and so on. The good news? All this talk about reading may resuscitate the printed word. If you’re at CES, visit the eReader exhibit on the CES floor and the HigherEd Tech Summit.* Both will be discussing how ebooks will replace those high-priced printed versions.

3D: James Cameron may be getting all the 3D glory on the big screen this season, but there are plenty of folks at CES leaving their 3D mark. Look for notebooks and netbooks from the likes of Acer (3D glasses required). SONY, Mitsubishi, and Panasonic will be showing the next variant of 3D TV (glasses required on most, not all). Even the gamemakers (keep an eye on PlayStation) will be supporting 3D output. ASUS has just announced a 3D gaming notebook, the G51 J 3D. My favorite? Fujifilm has a new camera that shoots photos and videos in 3D and requires no glasses. The trick? Two sensors built into the camera.

Mobile Phones and Their Apps: There are now over 100,000 iPhone apps; that’s a pretty big business. But the iPhone is being challenged by Android, RIM Blackberry, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm, and Nokia’s Symbian environments. As consumers, we want to know what apps are worth paying for; as a developer, you’ll want to know what apps to create for. These topics will be visited in multiple places on the show floor, but the Mobile Apps Showdown should be a nice culmination of an app-ified world.

Mind and Body: Take a motion sensor, add some software and a cloud computing app, and you’ve got the recipe for a healthier body. Look for everything from digital pedometers with online recordkeeping to elaborate systems that measure your energy output and give you enough readout to put the Challenger’s dashboard to shame. Watch for biofeedback, relaxation, remote medical data collection, and more.

Telepresence: Yes, it’s a Trekian buzzword, but get used to it. Simply (probably too simply) put, telepresence creates the illusion that something is near you, even though it is not. Video conferencing, distance learning, remote medical diagnoses–all of these rely on telepresence. Look for Cisco to take the lead, but IBM, Microsoft, and others will express their violent interest in this topic.

Augmented Reality: A close cousin of telepresence, augmented reality was beginning to seep into our collective consciousness at the last CES. It’s back, and in general it describes a technology that adds a level of information on top of your physical reality. Point your phone at a person and it might automatically recognize them and offer the person’s vital stats for you. Point a digital camera at an object (say, a museum) and have entries about that object appear on your screen. Making augmented reality more real are manufacturers like NVIDIA. Its new Tegra chip packs the power of a PC onto a single, small chip.

* Disclosure: My company, Living in Digital Times, produces the Mobile Apps Showdown and the HigherEd Tech Summit at CES.

This notion of favorite play patterns wasn’t lost on Ted Barnett, the CEO, co-founder, and dad behind the new virtual world, SuperSecret. Despite the name, there are few secrets embedded in the game. The secret is how Barnett deftly created an electronic crockpot of everything that kids who are too old for the Club Penguin scene, but too young for Facebook, like to do.

The meat in the stew is a bunch of relatively mindless but fun games—not unlike the games you find on AddictingGames.com or Miniclip.com, two of the most widely trafficked websites for tweens. But unlike those sites, where you feel like you’ve entered a morass of disparate games, SuperSecret plunks these diversions (40 flash games) into a context.

The secret sauce is the virtual world that surrounds the game play. First, there’s you! Your task in this virtual world is to grow up. You begin as a lowly 10-year-old by choosing one of 20 different characters. As you play more, you actually age, and with age comes increased privileges that you’ve earned. Anyone can play for free, but once you’ve aged past 12 you’ll need to subscribe to the service. Each age brings a new set of friends, challenges, games, pets, and surprises. Brilliant. What kid doesn’t want to grow up (virtually or for real)?

And the world itself is a nice mix of not too cutesy cartoony, but still clearly a child’s world of exploration. The locations are fun places like the Quad and Midway. Like Club Penguin, there’s chat of various kinds. In the stuff tweens love category, players can see where their friends are in the virtual world and a cellphone pop-up lets them stay in touch while playing.

In the crowded world of virtual worlds, it’s tough to predict what kids will love and what will leave them cold, but SuperSecret certainly has all of the right stuff to make it a really strong contender.\r\n\r\nSee what USA Today has to say.

That’s the question that Amy Tucker, CEO of Matter Group and founder of a new kid’s multimedia property called Xeko, posed at a recent meeting of Women in Children’s Media where the subject was “green” media.

Xeko challenges kids to “Be a Force of Nature.” By combining a trading card game, eco-friendly plush dolls, a cast of animals facing extinction, exotic endangered locales, and difficult web-based missions, Xeko itself promises to be a force to be reckoned with.

While the game play is a bit convoluted for my tired brain, kids seem to love it. Watch a Xeko card game demo at Ambitious Green.

And, from what I can tell, the love extends passed the earnest “Birkenstock-wearing” families to good old kids that find Xeko as captivating as the Yu-gi-ohs or Pokemons of the world. The game play appeals to the same card-collecting, rule-memorizing kids that love trading cards, but, as Tucker says, “it’s organic—good for people, high quality, and good for the planet.”

You’ll want to give Xeko a try and keep that notion of organic media close as you guide your kids through their media choices.

My name is Hybrid Snoodle. I’m pretty hip-looking with my army chick/punk-er getup: camouflage t-shirt, black fishnet tights, short skirt, day-glo helmet, and one of those shapely 3D bodies. It’s 2 AM and in a few hours I’ll be back to life as Robin Raskin. But for the moment I am off on Orientation Island, the newbie training ground for Second Life. Second Life is one of the largest of the online virtual worlds; it’s also one of the graphically richest and most compelling worlds in the growing number of online communities.

I jumped into Second Life to witness firsthand the allure. I depended on the kindness of strangers (and there were more than a few strange-ers out there) to help me master how to move, gesture, find clothing, chat, shout, and more. Clueless was an understatement.

Upon completion of training you’re ready for the real thing, well, the real virtual thing. Second Lifers spend inordinate numbers of hours conversing, building, drinking, gardening, shopping, dancing, going to conferences and doing just about anything else that you do in the real world. They’re just doing it in a cyberworld.

And they spend real money in this virtual world. Real money buys Second Life’s currency, the Linden Dollar. An annual fee to Second Life gives you a small Linden Dollar allowance each week. Then, you need to figure out how to augment your allowance with good old ingenuity.

Why, I keep asking myself, am I spending time in Second Life land when my first life as a mom, wife, and entrepreneur is already keeping me teetering on the brink? For the moment my best answer is Sir Edmund Hillary’s “because it is there.” But, for many women, Second Life is just as real and perhaps more interesting and compelling than their first.

I gave Ef Deal (note to editor: that’s her real name, sorry), a high school teacher and writer, a call because she has a very involved Second Life. As a teacher, Deal is convinced that Second Life has an important part to play in schools. Deal meets with other teachers in Second Life where they hold conferences, share ideas, and network. To relax she’s built a little garden oasis where you can join her to sip tea and listen to the burble of the brook. When she had a bout with a migraine-like condition she used her private cyber getaway as a place to relax and feel better.

But all is not perfect in Deal’s garden of cyber-Eden. She’s been stalked in her home, with her photo snapped as she was changing her clothes. Once she had to evict a naked troublemaker from her property. And sometimes she learns the local customs the hard way, like the time a cyber-friend informed her she’d be treated a lot better with a new “skin.” (Second Life’s own brand of racism is what she called it.) And while you can do all of these socially acceptable things in Second Life, there’s no shortage of lap dance joints and strip clubs as wanderers seek to fulfill their sexual fantasies. You can buy S&M equipment, meet a virtual madam, or visit a brothel, but you’ll want to buy some genitalia first. (Second Life avatars have none to start.)

Second Life is far from the only virtual world out there. Women over 30 like worlds like Moove with its focus on matchmaking and meetups. There.com and Worlds.com are also based on social meetings. Younger women in their twenties flock to Gaia for its tools to create intricate private spaces. Kaneva offers play places. And no list would be complete without crediting The Sims, one of the early worlds for stepping out of your reality.

Curse or Blessing?
Is heading out for a spin the virtual community tantamount to trying a shot of heroin? Like all things Internet, the virtual world has its pros and cons; much depends on who you ask and what’s your definition of time well spent. A therapist friend of mine reports that more and more of her patients are coming to see her with an online dimension to their problems. For some that’s gambling or virtual infidelity. For others it’s an addiction to some sort of role-playing game. For others it’s their second life.

Many therapists would say that these worlds perpetuate the illusion of reality but it’s just an illusion. The social cues of the real world are missing. But others say it’s no less or more than the real world, it’s just different. They say that cultures are evolving and traditions are being formed.

Can you be addicted to your virtual life? An addiction is something you are compelled to do – free choice starts to edge out of the equation. The American Medical Association is noodling on this as I write, trying to decide whether Internet addiction deserves a place in the litany of medical maladies. More research is needed, they say.

Most women I’ve talked to enjoy Second Life, and like going there precisely because it’s not their first life. They feel a sense of control over where they go and what they do. If they don’t like the life they’ve made, well, they can get out. If they haven’t spent hours primping who cares? They can invent a world as they imagine it, unconstrained by those real world borders. What’s there not to like?

Real World Self Control
Moderation is the key to keeping your sanity in the virtual world. Like anything else in real life, these worlds are fine until they become obsessions and interfere with your daily life. Virtual worlds can be just as addicting as working out, shopping, TV, work, or any number of things; they become “addicting” when people lose the ability to set and maintain priorities.

Another thing to remember is that virtual worlds are out to make money. Not that making money is wrong, but you should be aware of who’s representing themselves and who’s representing some great initiative. Some 50 million people participate in a virtual world online today. To give you an idea of the size of these worlds, The Walt Disney Co. acquired Club Penguin in a deal worth as much as $700 million and Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, is rumored to be worth $750 million. And, believe it or not, some Second Lifers have become real world millionaires from businesses launched in cyberspace.

Thinking of Getting A Life?
It costs nothing to join until you want to buy something. You can sign up at http://secondlife.com/ and then download and install a small piece of software on your PC. You really need to have a cutting edge PC with fast graphics since Second Life has lots of heavy duty graphics and renderings. (The program will analyze your machine as it loads and if they say you’re going to need more ummph in your PC, you better believe it.)

And don’t forget to look me up while you’re there.