Since it was released in 2007, Google Street View has allowed users to explore a given area from the perspective of walking along a sidewalk, but with the new tool, they’ll actually be able to see how the street and its surroundings have changed.

That’s the premise behind Google Maps’ newest time-lapse tool, launched today. Street View has primarily been used as a way of visualising directions to help users find and identify locations they are looking for, but the service has become increasingly popular among 'armchair explorers', who have used Street View to discover far away parts of the world without ever leaving home.A lot can change in seven years: buildings rise and landscapes change. Whether you’re standing near the ocean in Japan or in the middle of Times Square, your view will likely be quite different in less than a decade. You can even experience different seasons and see what it would be like to cruise Italian roadways in both summer and winter,' he said. '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. 'Now with Street View, you can see a landmark's growth from the ground up, like the Freedom Tower in New York city or the 2014 World Cup stadium in Fortaleza, Brazil,' said Shet.

Google's cars have driven across most of the world, but this is the first time the search giant has made more than one version of the resulting images available to the public.

Google's Street View uses car-mounted cameras to capture street-level photos of the world, stitching the images together into a virtual representation of the real world overlaid on Google's maps. (AP Photo/Google) Photograph: Uncredited/AP Photograph: Uncredited/AP This image shows what a building in Singapore looked like in October 2008, upper left, against a more recent photo.

Google maps 2008 street view