SheepView 360º is Like a Wooly Street View

Durita Dahl Andreassen and some of the other 49,188 people who live on the Faroe Islands, a remote archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean want people to come visit. I guess if you had to see the same 49,000 people day in and day out, you’d want visitors too. Since Google won’t get out there and do a Street View to lure in tourists, Andreassen and her helpers decided to do it themselves.

sheepview-tbzoom in

However, they didn’t stick cameras on their cars or wear backpacks to do this. Since the Faroe Islands have about 80,000 sheep roaming around, Andreassen chose five of the wooly critters and strapped a harness onto the sheep that contains a solar panel and a 360-degree camera that stores GPS coordinates.

The sheep then roam around, certainly wondering just WTF that is on their backs as they captures images of their surroundings. I mean, I’m pretty sure that sheep wearing a camera in the photo isn’t in the road for fun, he’s like “Hey, you! Get this thing off me!”

[via Engadget]

Sheep Bedside Tables Are Sheer Insanity

This unusual bedside table was inspired by the works of Salvador Dalí and made by Oscar Tusquets, an artist in Spain. He built these drawers using taxidermied sheep. Obviously.
sheep cabinetmagnify


They specifically reference this image by Dalí seen here called “Interpretation Project for a Stable-Library.” You can see the sheep cabinet on the left side of the image. And now this dude is bringing it to life. Using dead sheep. Tusquets worked with a famous French taxidermy studio in Paris, to make 21 sheep cabinets in all. Each one has bronze feet, a tabletop and a drawer for all of your stuff that you absolutely must store in a dead sheep.

sheep cabinet1magnify


There will be 20 white sheep and one black sheep with white legs, just to keep things interesting. Each cabinet will sell for about $82,000(USD). Now that’s a lot of bah bah bucks.

[via Weird Universe via Neatorama]

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Swiss Researchers Invent System to Text Shepherds When Sheep Are under Attack

Apparently, sheep herding is big business in some parts of Switzerland and elsewhere in the world. The problem for Swiss shepherds is that wolves are making return to the area after being gone for about 100 years. That means that their previously safe sheep are now coming under attack and being killed by wolves.

sheep

Researchers from the country have now developed a system that can monitor the heart rate of the sheep. The system has been proven to work effectively by noting increased heart rate when a wolf attacks a flock of sheep. The heart rate sensor system can be integrated with a collar that would be able to text shepherds when sheep are under attack.

The researchers expect to be able to test the new collar, which can also spray wolf repellent, sometime next year. I wonder how the system would differentiate between increased heart rate due to attacks or simply a male sheep staring at a female sheep.

[via Phys.org]


Prototype heart monitor collar could let sheep text their shepherd, tattle on creeping wolves

Prototype heart monitor collar could let sheep text their shepherd, tattle on creeping wolves

It's easy to imagine the lonely Swiss shepherd casually texting his pals during a long day in the field, but reading an SMS from his flock? More possible then you might think. A recent trial in Switzerland outfitted 10 sheep with heart monitoring collars and submitted them to a simulated wolf attack, causing their heart rate to jump from 60 / 80 BPM to 225. The team behind the experiment hope to pair the significant change in heart rate with a future device that releases a predator deterrent while simultaneously sending a text message to the local shepherd. Complete prototypes are being prepped for a 2013 trial in Switzerland and France, where wolf attacks are on the rise. The devices hopes to offer owners of smaller flocks an affordable alternative to keeping a sheepdog.

[Image credit: Shutterstock]

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Prototype heart monitor collar could let sheep text their shepherd, tattle on creeping wolves originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Aug 2012 03:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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