If you're a parent of young children, you probably hear it often on Christmas Eve: “Where's Santa now?” With tracking tools like NORAD Santa Tracker AND Google Santa Trackereveryone can know when Santa Claus will come. Additionally, there are now several new AI tools available to bring the magic of the holidays.
Here's how to track Santa's journey on Christmas Eve with the help of artificial intelligence.
Track Santa with NORAD
NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) had the first ever Santa tracker in 1955. While it used to be just a boring animation of Santa's sleigh and reindeer flying around the map, NORAD has since added tons of features like fun mini-games, videos, stories, and Christmas music.
Most recently NORAD's Santa Tracker started cooperation with OpenAI to introduce new features based on artificial intelligence. These include an image generator that turns your selfie into an animated elf character, a tool that generates toy ideas and turns them into printable storybook pages, and a storytelling tool that lets families add names, places and other details to create a fun holiday story to read aloud.
Instead of a 2D model, the NORAD Santa Locator includes a 3D visual image of Santa's journey because the platform is built on Cesiumopen source 3D mapping library. Also uses Bing Maps satellite imagesmaking the globe look more “realistic”.
In addition to the tracker, users can also see “Santa Cam” with videos of Santa traveling around the world to deliver gifts to each child on the cool list.
The NORAD website features Santa's Village at the North Pole, which features a Christmas countdown, arcade-style games, kid-friendly music, an online library, and various videos that can be viewed on the official NORAD website YouTube canal.
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The NORAD Santa Locator is available at noradsanta.orgor you can download the official NORAD Tracks Santa Claus app on Apple App Store or Google Play Store. The website is available in English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian and Portuguese.
You can also track Santa through NORAD Tracker social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter/XAND Instagram.
If you would like a more personal experience, call 1-877-HI-NORAD (1-877-446-6732) and you will speak to a volunteer from the organization's call center who will advise you of Santa's location.
Track Santa using Google
Google's Santa tracker was launched in 2004 and simulates tracking Santa Claus. The website includes an up-to-date map of Santa's current location, his next stop, a live video feed of his route and an estimated time of arrival at each location. It also shows the total distance Santa has traveled so far and the number of gifts delivered.
Throughout December, the site functions as Santa's Village, where users can play mini-games, take quizzes, watch animated videos and engage in other interactive activities. For example, players can build their own elf in the Google game “Elf Maker” and also organize a concert with “Elf Jamband”. Kids can also learn coding with easy and fun tutorials like Code Boogie.
Additionally, users can use Google Assistant to find out Santa's whereabouts. You might ask, “Hey Google, where's Santa?” or even “What's new at the North Pole?” which allows you to tune in to the Google North Pole Newscast where you can find out what Santa and his elves are up to that day. Google Assistant also allows you to call Santa Claus himself.
This story was updated after publication.
