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The Faroe Islands want to change 360-degree Sheep View for Google Street View

The Faroe Islands want to change 360-degree Sheep View for Google Street View

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Journey down one of the Faroe Islands' roads and you'll see a landscape that looks look strikingly like the video game world of Skyrim, with rugged hills, mournful coastlines, and breathtaking natural beauty in the northern Atlantic Ocean. But there's a problem — there's nobody outside the Faroe Islands able to see it. Google has yet to record the roads of the Faroes for its Street View mapping service, meaning that would-be travelers have to rely on word of mouth or other tourists' photos to get an idea of the place.

Solar-powered cameras were strapped to five sheep

That's where the islands' sheep come in. Faroe Islander Durita Dahl Andreassen borrowed the services of five of the wooly animals to document the island in 360-degree videos, providing a sheep's-eye view of its outstanding natural beauty — a kind of DIY Street View. The video gives a good view of the islands — albeit from the perspective of a waist-high animal very intent on eating grass — captured by solar-powered 360-degree cameras. Andreassen has also taken a series of pictures from these mounted cameras, and mapped the grazing spots of the sheep, letting you know where exactly each image was taken.

But the intention is not to replace Street View with Sheep View, but to compel Google to actually make the trip to the 18 islands. "My sheep are great for capturing the tracks and trails of the Faroe Islands," Andreassen writes in her petition on the Faroe Islands' tourist website. "But in order to cover the big sweeping Faroese roads and the whole of the breath-taking landscapes, we need Google to come and map them." Until then, though, the islands might need some more ovine volunteers — lucky the Faroes have more sheep than people.