My favorite coffee shop in Austin used to have this wall of pictures showing the evolution of the city, its streets and its people over the course of the last 200 years or so. I never once in ten years minded waiting in that coffee line, as every time I walked in and spent a moment gazing into the past, I noticed something new in the old that made me feel even more connected with this city that I now call home. It was, in a way, like a mini time-travel expedition for the eyes and of course, my highly visual and imaginative mind. Some of the folks at Google must have felt this same affinity for the notion of visual time travel, as this week they rolled out historical imagery for Street View.

“Forget going 88mph in a DeLorean – you can stay where you are and use Google Maps to virtually explore the world as it is – and as it was” stated Street View product manager Vinay Shet. Historical imagery from Street View collections will go back as far as 2007, when the company began compiling data. Currently the “time travel option” is only available on Google Maps for desktop, but imagine the future possibilities when it is cleared for new areas of technology – obviously having the option on a smartphone or tablet will be next on the wish list, but viewing a time-lapse video of the history some of your favorite places through Google Glass or say, an Oculus, would be pretty rad too.

To begin your online time travel adventure, simply look for a clock icon in the upper left corner of a Street View panorama. You can then move a slider to review the timeline or find a particular moment in history, clicking on which will open it to a full-screen display. In addition to the time-travel feature, today’s update boosted Street View to 12 million miles worth of interactive photos, according to the Wall Street Journal. While most areas will only have been hit by the Google Street View car two or three times since 2007, major metro areas and places of interest will include 20 or more, Google Maps Street View director of engineering Luc Vincent told the Journal. Say for instance you’re interested in watching the construction of the Freedom Tower in New York City from the ground up, or would like to see the destruction and subsequent rebuild of Onagawa after the devastating earthquake and tsunami of 2011 – assuming you’re using a desktop computer, the technology is now at your fingertips to view in one fell swoop.