Rivermaya's Coffee Corner

>Thanks to NORAD and Google you can watch Santa make his deliveries around the world. The best place to watch Santa is with Google Earth. If you haven’t already, download Google Earth, then simply download the official santa tracker

With Christmas coming tomorrow (or now, if you’re reading this in East Asia), a variety of tools are available to track Santa Claus’ progress around the world. Why not use the mirror world to track his movement in 3D? Microsoft Virtual Earth is tracking Santa as is Google Earth, with help from NORAD. If you’re out and about finishing last-minute shopping, you can still keep track of Santa with Earthscape’s app for the iPhone. Particularly with NORAD’s involvement, it’s easy to draw parallels to projects from the intelligence community used to visualize data in 3D environments.

Google will be displaying high-resolution “Santa Cam” video of the gift-laden airborne sleigh. For locations without video, photos from Panoramio will be displayed in Google Maps.

And for the first time, people can track Santa’s journey on mobile phones with Google Maps for Mobile and follow him on Twitter by adding “@noradsanta.”

• Official Santa Tracker – Google officially teamed up with Norad (the US North American Air Defense Command), which has been tracking Santa on their radar system for many years, to officially provide tracking for Santa in Google Earth. You should visit the NORADSanta.org web site to see the countdown to Christmas Eve and some games and other information related to the tracking system (and choose other languages).
• Santa’s Route – You can check out Santa’s route right now in Google Earth based on information from Travel by GPS. Click on the “Points” folder and select “Tools->Play Tour” from the GE menu to see a really cool flying tour of the route. Pretend you are Santa! You can E-mail Travel by GPS a placemark from Google Earth for the location of your house, and they will add your house to the route. Click here for more information.
• Santa from Space – In 2005, one of the Google Earth Community members called ‘ear1grey’ posted an amazing discovery. He found a huge picture (36 miles tall) of Santa. He made a nifty Google Earth file for kids so they could go find the Santa by following the red nose of Rudolf the reindeer. Download this file and then turn on the “Little world” in your “Temporary Places“. Look in the nose of Rudolf for Santa.

Happy Holidays Everyone !

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