How to Track Santa Claus on Christmas Eve Using Artificial Intelligence

If you’re a parent with young children, you’ll probably hear this a lot on Christmas Eve: “Where’s Santa now?” Using tracking tools like NORAD Santa Tracker and Google’s Santa Tracker, everyone can know when Santa will arrive. Plus, there are now some new AI tools to bring the holiday magic.

Here’s how to follow Santa’s journey on Christmas Eve with the help of artificial intelligence.

Track Santa Claus with NORAD

NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) had its first-ever Santa tracker in 1955. While it was just a boring animation of Santa’s sleigh and reindeer flying across the map, NORAD has added a lot of features since then, like fun mini-games, videos, stories, and Christmas music.

Recently, NORAD’s Santa Tracker teamed up with OpenAI to offer new AI-powered features. This includes a picture generator that turns your selfies into an animated 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 allows families to add names, places, and other details to create a fun holiday story to read aloud.

Instead of a 2D model, the NORAD Santa Tracker contains a 3D visual depiction of Santa’s journey as the platform is built on Cesium’s open source 3D mapping library. It also uses Bing Maps satellite images, making the globe look more “realistic.”

Along with the tracker, users can also watch the “Santa Cam,” which contains videos of Santa making his way around the world delivering 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 many videos that can be viewed on the official NORAD YouTube channel.

The NORAD Santa Tracker is available at noradsanta.org, or you can download the official NORAD Tracks Santa app on the 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’s social media accounts, such as Facebook, twitter And Instagram.

For a more personable experience, call 1-877-HI-NORAD (1-877-446-6732), and you’ll speak with a volunteer from the organization’s call center who will update you on Santa’s location.

Track Santa Claus with Google

Google’s Santa Tracker was launched in 2004 and simulates tracking Santa. The site contains a live map of Santa’s current location, his next stop, a live video feed of his route, and an estimated arrival time for each location. It also shows the total distance Santa has traveled so far and the number of gifts he has delivered.

Throughout the month of December, the page serves as Santa’s Village, where users can play mini-games, take quizzes, watch animated videos, and explore other interactive activities. For example, players can build their own elf in Google’s “Elf Maker” game as well as host a concert with an “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 where Santa is. You can ask: “Hey Google, where’s Santa?” Or even “What’s new in the Arctic?” Which lets you listen 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 himself.

This story was updated after publication.