Quote - What I mean, is normal maps can be used for animating. Imagine completly changing the shape of an existing object with a change of a map... not replacing it, swapping in one object for another, but completly changing the objects shape.

You could possibly also do a gradual dissolve from one shape to another, and since you can animate textures already, even the textureing could be changed easily on the fly in an animation.

Imagine a banana slowly changing into an orange as a simple example... not a 2d image replacement, but a full 3d conversion.

 

I'd say, you could do it in Poser today. Looking at Baggins Bill's columns created from a cylinder
using displacement maps.
As you can animate almost any value in Poser's material room, it should be possible to change 
shapes using math nodes in the displacement channel.
 

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