US: Starting today, users of Google Street View will be offered a chance to travel back in time and see how the place has changed over the time in Google Maps. Google has gathered historical imagery from past Street View collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of the world.
Above: If you see a clock icon in the upper left-hand portion of a Street View image, click on it and move the slider through time and select a thumbnail to see that same place in previous years or seasons.
This new feature can also serve as a digital timeline of recent history, like the reconstruction after the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Onagawa, Japan. The time lapse feature will appear in a window within Street View, along with a bar users can manually toggle to change years. (It includes a substitute for Pegman, the little yellow guy users drag to launch Street View. On time lapse, your guide is an avatar that looks an awful lot like Dr. Brown from Back to the Future.)
Source: Google’s official blog, Time
