Happy New Year! Welcome to 2010. No flying cars yet, but it still feels like the future.

And Skype is hoping to help make our future a little clearer.

When I was a kid, there was a little exhibit tucked away in one of the theme parks in Orlando, FL--either Walt Disney World or Universal Studios, though the nostalgia part of my brain has long since turned all of that into an indecipherable mash of childhood joy--displaying a single, futuristic device that, at the time, seemed as amazing to me as a personal jet pack. It looked like an ordinary office telephone--lots of buttons, a little on the bulky side--but it had a single distinguishing feature that made it better than any other phone I'd ever seen: a video screen.

The screen was, at most, a couple of inches wide. And, even if you could afford a video phone, who would you call with it? But if we were ever to have warp drives, teleporters, and square meals in pill form, we had to start somewhere.

Phone developers weren't really thinking about the Internet back then, of course. A few years later, the dot com bubble (though it was destined to pop) would introduce high-speed Internet connections to many homes. Skype and other VOIP services would change the way we look at telecommunications and, along with instant messaging and teleconferencing software, would help make video calling a more convenient reality.

At this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Skype plans to announce that it is upgrading its software to include 720p high-definition video at 30 frames per second. If you have the hardware (including an HD Web cam) and a solid Internet connection, your Skype calls are about to get shiny.

Of course, if you've got HD video chat capabilities, you probably want to be able to see your friends and family members' heads on a really big display. Thus, Skype is also going to be embedding its video chat software in a series of HD televisions in 2010.

I, for one, am going to have a very hard time not feeling like a fictional spaceship captain while talking to my coworkers via my giant television. But, it's a risk I'm genuinely looking forward to taking.

What technological advances are you hoping for (or is your inner child still dreaming about) in 2010?