Tourism staff on a remote island chain have recruited sheep to help map the island. It’s part of a campaign to get Google to add the Faroe Islands to its Street View service,

Google has so far passed up the opportunity to send its vehicle-mounted cameras to the Islands, largely because they are 200 miles from the nearest mainland, which is Scotland. Of the 18 islands that make up the country, only one is inhabited and the population is just 48,700. Famously the number of sheep is somewhere in the region of double that number.

Tourism office member Durita Dahl Andreassen has been campaigning since April for Google to add the roads to Street View, something she believes would help promote the area through virtual tourism.

She’s now taken the campaign a step further by recording images both on and off-road using sheep in place of cars. This involved attaching a 360 degree camera to the back of a sheep, along with a portable solar panel (to avoid the need to track down the sheep for recharging) and an iPhone to send the images back to her office as soon as they are captured.