Engineering and Theatre Students Invent New Products

In just a few years, a handful of Colorado State University students and professors were able to design, create, and bring to market a useful and unique new technology. This technology was created in order to fulfill the students’ year-long senior design projects, yet ended up being a great achievement. The technology was designed and produced exclusively by engineering and theatre students, with guidance from two professors from the engineering and performing arts colleges.

The team, called RamBox Inc., decided that a large number of stage hands were unnecessary for most productions, and started building components that would streamline the process and eliminate the need for extra people. The engineering students created several working components along the way, including a “FOGBox” (which controlled a smoke machine’s rate of flow), a “Slidebox” (which could advance and reverse a projector), and a “PCBox” (which could control a computer using preset commands). The theatre students were essentially the Marketing and Support group, with broad responsibilities that aided in the product’s final realization.

One of the products, the “PCBox”, was eventually licensed to Rosco Laboratories in July 2005. Rosco incorporated the PCBox into their Keystroke product, in order to streamline certain types of presentations, and help make production setup more efficient. Keystroke was then named one of Live Design Magazine’s Products of the Year in 2006.

The sale of the PCBox technology would not have been possible without the help of the Colorado State University Research Foundation’s knowledge and expertise. CSURF, a nonprofit organization, helps facilitate the transition of university research from the laboratory to the marketplace, leading to positive impacts on the economy and business development among other things. The licensing of PCBox is an example of CSURF’s positive effects on an industry, in their willingness to acquire the ownership rights from the student inventors and by crafting the agreement with Rosco. With the help of CSURF, people at Colorado State are actively helping to change the world.