Off the Rails Episode 147: Why didn’t you ask for it?

Oct 12

Written By AVSF

Recorded October 9, 2026

Seven seasons. Six years. And somehow we still haven’t figured out how to start the show on time. We kick off another season of Off the Rails with questionable advice, unsolicited opinions, and a news story about “AI holograms” that turns into an argument over Pepper’s Ghost, large language models, refrigerator-sized displays, and whether any of this really needs to be a hologram in the first place.

Then we get into something slightly more useful: the documentation that’s routinely missing from AV projects. We’re great at documenting hardware, signal flow, rack elevations, and where the displays go—but what about how the system is actually supposed to operate? We talk programming, DSP configurations, user interfaces, submittals, commissioning, RFP language, subcontractors, and the uncomfortable realization that higher ed AV teams may be just as guilty of relying on institutional knowledge instead of properly documenting their own systems.

Finally, we tackle lifecycle planning for “other people’s stuff” and departmental AV and technology that somehow becomes IT’s problem when it stops working. How do you inventory systems you didn’t install, plan replacement cycles you don’t control, and explain to a department that “it still turns on” isn’t necessarily a lifecycle strategy?

News article: https://www.techlearning.com/learning/stem/teaching-with-ai-holograms

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