How to track Santa Claus this Christmas Eve using AI

Summary

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 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 the holiday magic. Here’s how to follow Santa’s journey this Christmas Eve with the help of AI. Track Santa Claus with NORAD NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence 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 across a map, NORAD has added tons of features since then, such as fun mini-games, videos, stories, and Christmas music. Recently, NORAD’s Santa Tracker teamed up 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. Image Credits: NORADImage Credits:NORAD Rather than a 2D model, the NORAD Santa tracker has a 3D 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 see a “Santa Cam,” which has videos of Santa making his way around the world to deliver presents to every kid on the nice list. NORAD’s website has Santa’s North Pole Village, which includes 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. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 NORAD Santa tracker is available on noradsanta.org, or you can download the official NORAD Tracks Santa app on Apple’s App Store or t...