As technology evolves past what the mind can imagine, it is no wonder shape shifting phones are literally on the horizon. Intel are currently cooking up exactly that.

At Intel’s Pittsburgh lab, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, senior researcher Jason Campbell says: “We’re working on materials that can change their shapes.” Think of a smartphone that resizes itself into a netbook when you are ready to surf the Web. The material being worked with is transparent silicon dioxide hemispheres. Spherical or cylindrical materials that lend themselves to reshaping via electrical impulses.

Campbell says “we hope that we’re three to five years away in terms of producing millimeter-scale versions of those electromagnetic prototypes.” From this, depending on the application, “if you want to carry the device, you’d make it as small as possible [by] making it pack itself as densely as possible. When you go to [surf] the Web, you’re going to make it as big as possible, you’re going to make it “foamy.” Lucky for the ladies, with the evolution of fashion, skinny jeans will be back ‘in’ by then and we will need phones to compensate with the lack of pocket space.

[via Information Week]