If you are a parent with young children, you will probably hear this question a lot on Christmas Eve: “Where’s Santa right now?” With tracking tools like the NORAD Santa Tracker and Google’s Santa Tracker, everyone can know when Father Christmas will arrive. Plus, there are now some new AI tools to bring even more holiday magic. Here is how to follow Santa’s journey this Christmas Eve with the help of AI.
NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defence Command, created the first-ever Santa tracker in 1955. While it originally featured a simple animation of Santa’s sleigh and reindeer flying across a map, NORAD has added many features since then, such as fun mini-games, videos, stories, and Christmas music.
Recently, NORAD’s Santa Tracker partnered with OpenAI to introduce new AI-powered features. These include an image generator that transforms your selfie into an animated elf character, a tool for generating toy ideas and converting them into printable coloring book pages, and a fill-in-the-blank storytelling tool that allows families to add names, places, and other details to create a fun holiday story to read aloud.
Rather than a two-dimensional model, the NORAD Santa tracker now has a three-dimensional visual depiction of Santa’s journey, as the platform was built on Cesium’s open source 3D mapping library. It also uses Bing Maps satellite imagery, making the globe look more realistic.
Along with the tracker tool, users can also view a “Santa Cam,” which features videos of Santa making his way around the world to deliver presents to every child on the nice list. NORAD’s website includes Santa’s North Pole Village, which offers a holiday countdown, arcade-style games, kid-friendly music, an online library, and various videos that can be watched on NORAD’s official YouTube channel.
The NORAD Santa tracker is available on its website, or you can download the official NORAD Tracks Santa app from 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 track Santa through NORAD Tracker’s social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For a more personal experience, you can call a dedicated phone number and speak with a volunteer from the organization’s call center who will update you on Santa’s location.
Google’s Santa Tracker launched in 2004 and simulates the tracking of Santa. The website features a live map of Santa’s current location, his next stop, a live video feed of his route, and the estimated arrival time 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 operates as Santa’s Village, where users can play mini-games, take quizzes, watch animated videos, and explore other interactive activities. For instance, players can build their own elf in Google’s “Elf Maker” game and host a concert with “Elf Jamband.” Children can also learn how to code with easy and fun tutorials like “Code Boogie.”
Additionally, users can enlist the help of Google Assistant to learn about Santa’s whereabouts. You can ask, “Hey Google, where’s Santa?” or even “What’s new at the North Pole?” which lets you tune into Google’s North Pole Newscast to hear what Santa and his elves are up to that day. Google Assistant also lets you call Santa himself.