Time Traveling with Street View
Have you ever wondered what your neighborhood looked like in the 18th century—or even during the Middle Ages? Thanks to Street View and AI, you can now almost find out. TimeJourneyAI is a new application that lets you pick a location in Street View and generate an AI-imagined version of that same spot for any year in history.
Liberty 2025
rom my limited testing, the historical views TimeJourneyAI produces aren’t always accurate. The image above shows the Street View for Liberty on Great Marlborough Street, London (the black-and-white Tudor building). Below is the same view in 1875, as imagined by the app.
Liberty 1875
I particularly like the horse-drawn London double-decker bus - presumably brought back from the future by some Victorian time-traveler and cleverly adapted for the pre-automobile era. For some reason, the Liberty shop has also completely vanished.
Liberty 1500
I can’t vouch for the architectural accuracy, but it does look convincingly Tudor. Soho was largely undeveloped farmland for much of the 16th century, so this picture could be reasonably accurate - although I suspect what is now Great Marlborough Street wouldn’t even have been a dirt track in 1500.
TimeJourneyAI also includes a 3D mode that turns any generated image into a fully explorable scene. One that you can actually walk around in and imagine that you truly have stepped back in time.
TimeJourneyAI may not be historically precise, but it’s a lot of fun to experiment with. My advice is to check it out soon. In the past, similar Street View + AI apps haven’t lasted long, as the combined costs of the Google Maps API and AI usage often prove unsustainable.
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