HO HO HO! Microsoft and Bing Maps help NORAD track Santa!

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is preparing for their annual tradition of tracking Santa around the globe. As NORAD conducts its primary mission of defending Canadian and United States airspace, they take on the supplementary mission of tracking Santa's journey for the holidays.

Much like Santa and his Elves, NORAD gets help from volunteers, partners and Microsoft Employees who will be joining the crew at the Peterson Airforce Base to ensure Santa's safe travels around the globe!

Track Santa on a 3D Map

Working with Cesium, a platform for developers to build web-based 3D map apps, NORAD has built a 3D tracker that displays Santa's whereabouts. The 3D tracker app uses Bing Maps satellite imagery to give a realistic texture to the 3D globe rendered by the CesiumJS library.

For devices that do not support 3D, the app falls back to a 2D map using the Bing Maps API. That map displays a pin marking Santa’s current location for you to follow. You can also learn more about each location Santa visits by clicking on an icon that brings up Wikipedia articles and Santa Cam videos that you can play.

Join the world-wide countdown to the big trip with NORAD, play some games and see Santa's location on a Bing Map by visiting https://www.noradsanta.org/.

Wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday season!

– The Bing Maps Team

• To learn more about the NORAD Tracks Santa Program, read their press release.
• For details about how Cesium uses Bing Maps to power 3D map apps, read their customer story.
• For more information about the Bing Maps platform, go to https:///www.microsoft.com/maps.

Source: Bing Blog Feed