Bath Fitting

Being a shape-shifter would be cool, but raises the question: could a single bathtub accomodate all of one's potential bodily forms? Well, shape-shifters of the world need not worry about this any longer, thanks to...

the Sony Bathman - or whatever the company decides to call its latest bizarre brainwave: the shape-shifting bath.

Sony engineer Tetsujiro Kondo says in this patent application that the bathtub would have interior walls made of a strong flexible polymer, with elastic cushioning panels behind them, supported in turn by electrically controlled pressure rams. These rams give the bath's interior walls their overall shape.

A bath-mounted controller could then be used to adjust the rams and consequently the height and width of the bath's walls. Of course, there's no point making the bath narrower if it's already full, as the water would spill out. So Kondo suggests the controller could use a water level sensor to only allow the tub to adjust to shapes that can safely contain the water within it.