Thus, necessity begat invention. If even Google Street View wouldn't come to the Faroe Islands, we had to make the Faroe Islands visible to the rest of the world in a different way.

We decided to make street view our self with the one thing that the Faroe Islands have plenty of: Sheep!

We mounted 360-degree cameras on the backs of some sheep with solar panels and a cell phone. The sheep wandered around and uploaded images via the phone through Google's open API. Sheep View was born.

The Faroe Islands has twice as many sheep as people and they can get to places where cars and even people haven't been.

We made the harness out of the solar panels and attached the Theta S 360 camera on top of that. We connected the camera to the mobile phone. The camera automatically uploaded the images to Google Streetview through Googles API.

One of the biggest problems we had was that the sheep would not return the equipment after use. We could easily mount the equipment by luring the sheep to us with food. But you can only fool a sheep once. So in our stage two version we also created a remote controlled drop function. But in most cases it was actually easier just to catch the sheep with a dog.

Faroe Islands' 'Sheep View' boosted tourism! Only 20 minutes after launch the story was on The Guardian, closely followed by BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, Daily Mail, Washington Post, Sky News etc. The 'Sheep View' invention generated 2 billion media impressions and an estimated PR value of $50 million.

The campaign caught the media's interest all over the in the world and suddenly Google was a little more amenable. They decided to support us with their equipment, and with the Google Street View team and at lot of volunteer help, we have now created Street View via Sheep View.

Norway, New Zeeland and Australia are now planning to make Sheep View in selected areas and thanks to sheep view biologists know a lot more about the life of the Faroese sheep.

We are currently making initial experiments with a much smaller camera and a herring gull.

A 360-camera equipped Sheep with solar panels on the back autogenerating streetview pictures and uploading them through an attached mobilephone, as it roams the country side. What's not to like?

Brief: Get Google Street View to the Faroe Islands.

Background

The Faroe Islands is one of the smallest countries in the world. The country have for many years been neglected by Google Street View. So until recently there was no Street View in the Faroe Islands. Google was simply not interested in the tiny country.

And with only 50,000 inhabitants the Faroe Islands had limited budget to make streetview them selves.