I found an awesome video on BoingBoing. It was created by researchers at The Harvard Microrobotics Lab. It’s made out of paper edged with actuators that can be programmed to automatically fold the sheet into simple origami forms. Besides being lazy and using it to fold your origami for you, it could be used to automatically adjust the size of, say, a coffee cup, depending on the amount of coffee poured into it. On a large scale, I’m not sure how useful this would be on, but on a smaller scale, we could have swiss army knives, tables, and other tools that could morph into other tools and shapes. Or we could stick it inside people: the medical implications seem promising.
Other potential uses mentioned in the comments include: teaching origami; autobots; books that turn their own pages and stay open when your’re reading; presents that automatically unwrap themselves; full automated toilet paper; combine it with flat screen technology and camera with facial recognition software and create a TV that always bends in a direction to give you the best possible view of the screen; solar panel roof on a house that could bend and shape itself to always face the most sunlight and then repeal water when it rained; a tent that pitches itself; bed that makes itself; business cards that become animated characters; parachutes that turn into rigid airfoils; umbrellas that fold up really small when not in use; that jacket from Back To the Future 2; self-folding maps to make it much easier to refold them; window blinds; self-constructing geodesic dones; multifunctional transforming furniture
Or, if all fails, use it to automatically roll your joints.