If you’re a parent with young children, then you’ll probably hear this a lot on Christmas Eve: “Where’s Santa right now?” With tracking tools like NORAD Santa Tracker and Google’s Santa Trackereveryone can know when Christmas will arrive. Plus, there are now some new AI tools to bring the holiday magic.
Here’s how you can follow Santa’s journey this Christmas Eve with the help of artificial intelligence.
Track Santa with NORAD
NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) had the first Santa tracker in 1955. While it used to be just a boring animation of Santa’s sleigh and reindeer flying across a map, NORAD has added tons of features since then, including fun mini-games, videos, stories, and Christmas music.
Recently, NORAD’s Santa Tracker partnered with OpenAI to introduce new AI-powered features. These include a picture maker that turns your selfie into a cartoon elf character, a tool to generate game ideas and turn them into printable coloring book pages, and a fill-in-the-blank storytelling tool that lets families add names, places and other details to create a fun holiday story to read.
Instead of a 2D model, the NORAD Santa tracker has a 3D visual representation of Santa’s journey as the platform was built in cesiumof the open source 3D mapping library. It also uses Bing Maps Satellite Imagesmaking the globe look more “realistic”.
Along with the tracking tool, users can also view a “Santa Cam,” which has video of Santa going around the world to deliver gifts to each child on the nice list.
NORAD’s website features Santa’s North Pole Village, which includes a holiday countdown, arcade-style games, kid-friendly music, an online library, and various videos that you can watch on the official NORAD YouTube channel.
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The NORAD Santa tracker is available at noradsanta.orgor you can download the official NORAD Tracks Santa app at Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store. The website is available in English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian and Portuguese.
You can also follow Santa through the NORAD Tracker social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
For a more pleasant experience, call 1-877-HI-NORAD (1-877-446-6732) and you will speak with a volunteer from the organization’s call center, who will inform you of Santa’s location.
Follow Santa with Google
Google’s Santa Tracker was launched in 2004 and simulates tracking Santa Claus. The site features a live map of Santa’s current location, his next stop, a live video feed of his route, and the estimated time of arrival for each location. It also shows the total distance Santa has traveled so far and the number of presents he has delivered.
Throughout December, the page acts as Santa’s Village, where users can play mini-games, take quizzes, watch animated videos and explore other interactive activities. For example, players can create their own elf in Google’s ‘Elf Maker’ game as well as organize a concert with the ‘Elf Jamband’. Kids can also learn how to code with easy and fun tutorials like “Code Boogie”.
Additionally, users can enlist the help of Google Assistant to find out about Santa’s whereabouts. You can ask, “Hey Google, where’s Santa Claus?” or even “What’s new at the North Pole?” which lets you tune in to Google’s North Pole Newscast, where you can hear what Santa and his elves are up to that day. Google Assistant also lets you call Santa Claus himself.
This story was updated after publication.
