STEM to GoogleEarth View

The STEM to GoogleEarth view projects the results of the STEM simulation onto GoogleEarths 3D display of the World. For example, in the following display, the progress of a disease is shown in red superimposed on the GoogleEarth display.

Prerequisites

You must have installed the GoogleEarth application which is available for personal use from the GoogleEarth download site. You should verify that GoogleEarth works correctly on your machine by starting it and verifing that you can browse the 3D image. Plus it is a fun application to play with. Note that some older computers do not have the 3D graphics capabilities required by GoogleEarth and you will not be able to run GoogleEarth.

Starting the STEM to GoogleEarth interface.

You can leave GoogleEarth running or not. STEM will start it if needed.

If you are running STEM from the source distribution, you need build the Servlets as described later.

Manual mode versus Automatic Mode.

The STEM to GoogleEarth is distributed with the default to run in Manual mode. In order to see the state of the disease superimposed on the GoogleEarth 3D image, you have to manually press the display button. The more interesting way to run it is with the GoogleEarth display being automatically updated on each cycle with the current status of the disease. But because both STEM and GoogleEarth use a lot of CPU resources and system memory, they will only run well simultaneously if you have at least two Gigabytes of memory and a fast processor. It will run with one gigabyte of memory but very slowly.

If you are lucky enough to have 2 Gigabytes memory, go to the GoogleEarth Preferences and set the "method" preference to "Asynch Servlet" or "Direct Launch".

The next time you start a simulation, you should then see the disease spread in the GoogleEarth window as STEM runs.

You can also right click in the STEM-GoogleEarth window to bring up a context menu with additional commands.

Building Servlets

If you are running from the STEM source distribution: If you are running the STEM standalone executable, the above steps were already done for you and you just need to start STEM.exe.