Sheep Cameras for Google Street View
SHARE

The internet has a long history of awesome videos made by strapping cameras to animals. In the Faroe Islands, however, animal-cams serve a more practical purpose as they use sheep to help populate Google Street View for the remote landscapes.

The project is a promotional campaign for the Faroe tourism agency hoping to generate attention for what looks like a rather beautiful natural landscape. The sheep cam setup includes a VR camera (it appears to be a Ricoh Theta), as well as a solar panel to keep it powered and a mobile phone in order to automatically upload the images. The camera takes one image every minute and, according to the video, captures mostly images of the sheep eating grass and sauntering about the islands.

The end game is a hope that Google will eventually come to the islands and use their big car and backpack camera rigs to create a more thorough VR experience of the island for Street View. It also doesn’t hurt the the campaign may generate some tourism money as photographers look for new “epic” landscapes to replace the overexposed beauty of Iceland.