Downloadsquad just posted a story today regarding Viewfinder.  Succinctly,  Viewfinder takes an uploaded image and matches it to a spot in the world through the use of Google Maps.  While I’m highly skeptical of the power of such a system, it sounds like it would be incredibly cool if they can pull it off, not to mention take some guesswork out of forensic investigations involving photos .As soon as I had read this story, however, I immediately recalled a project I had posted about many moons ago called Photosynth.  In essence, this technology takes a series of photos, and through a quite nebulous concept called “Image DNA”, it figures out the three-dimensional layout of the objects, and places them in a 3D environment for you to browse.  I had suggested at the time that Photosynth actual attempt to render those items into a 3D space that users could walk around in, but I get a bit nutty sometimes…

My main point to this post, however, is why doesn’t Viewfinder attempt to leverage the technology found in Photosynth?  Each of these applications could be useful depending on the user, but having the underlying technology power both applications would be phenomenal, and might be a great addition to a new OS or an applcation suite in its own right.

It will be interesting to see which comes to market first; Photosynth has been in development for quite some time, and having the intricacies of Google Maps integrated into that sort of technology will probably be a daunting task indeed.  The next question, of course, is how they’ll get this stuff streamed to my 360…