System Update Log
A plain-language summary of significant changes as we improve Intensity Lab. Minor fixes and behind-the-scenes work aren't listed here.
- Animation narration now reads a city and its state as one phrase ("Redwood Valley California") instead of pausing awkwardly between them.
- Cloud GPU rendering is more reliable: when GPU capacity is briefly unavailable in one part of the cloud, the system now tries other locations automatically instead of falling back to a much slower render. Observed-waveform animations, which cannot be rendered without a GPU in a reasonable time, now wait for capacity rather than failing.
- Expanded the Technical page's rendering section with the measured speed difference between GPU and CPU rendering.
- Animation narration has a new, much more natural-sounding voice. Times, dates, magnitudes, and station names are now spoken clearly (for example, "magnitude six point four" on "December twentieth" at "ten thirty two in the morning").
- Updated the Technical page with descriptions of the new narration voice and of how animations are rendered on cloud GPUs.
- Shaking animations are now rendered on cloud GPU instances, cutting rendering time from many hours to minutes — animations for new earthquakes appear on the site much sooner after the event.
- Added a Privacy Policy page and this System Update Log so you can see what's changed on the site.
- Our contact email (info@intensitylab.com) is now shown directly on the site instead of only through the feedback form.
- Earthquake shaking animations are now automatically posted to our YouTube channel as they're created, organized into a playlist for each earthquake.
- Fixed an issue that could cause the chat assistant to time out when answering longer questions.
- Launched a new AI-powered chat assistant — ask plain-language questions about earthquakes and seismology and get instant answers.