Mark Rober

Rober joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 2004.[4] He worked there for nine years, seven of which were spent working on the Curiosity rover, which is now on Mars.[3] He designed and delivered hardware on several JPL missions, including AMT, GRAIL, SMAP, and Mars Science Laboratory.[5] While at NASA, Rober was one of the primary architects for "JPL Wired", which was a comprehensive knowledge capture wiki.[5] He published a case study about applying wiki technology in a high-tech organization to develop an "Intrapedia" for the capture of corporate knowledge.[6]

During his time at NASA, Rober began making viral videos.[2] His videos cover a wide variety of topics, sparking ideas for April Fools' Day pranks[7][8] and teaching about tricks like beating an escape room and filming primates in zoos non-invasively.[2] He advocates for science, making videos testing the ability for sharks to smell blood in water,[9] fluidized sand[10] and water purification.[11]

In 2011, Rober recorded his first YouTube video involving a Halloween costume, involving two iPads which created the illusion of seeing through his body.[12] He posted the video of the "gaping hole in torso" costume on YouTube and it went viral, receiving 1.5 million views in just one day.[13][14] The following year, Rober launched Digital Dudz, an online Halloween costume company which specializes in Halloween costumes based on the same concept as the video (to which Rober holds the patent). The company earned a quarter million dollars in revenue in its first three weeks of operations, and by 2013 his app-integrated costumes were sold in retail stores such as Party City.[12][15][16] The costumes were widely featured on news channels such as CBS News, CNN, The Jay Leno Show, Fox, Yahoo! News, Discovery Channel, The Today Show and GMA,[17] and in 2013 Rober sold the company to UK-based costume company Morphsuits.[15]

In December 2018, Rober went viral with a video tricking parcel thieves with an engineered contraption that sprayed glitter on the thieves, receiving 25 million views in just one day.[18] The contraption engineered by Rober would explode glitter, emit a foul odor, and record the thieves during the process.[19] Rober later removed two of the five incidents caught on tape, unaware that two of the thieves were actually friends of a person he hired to help catch the package thieves.[19][20] Rober posted a follow-up to this video in December 2019, teaming up with Macaulay Culkin and featuring an improved design.[21]

In addition to YouTube, Rober has contributed articles to Men's Health,[22] and gave a TEDx presentation in 2015 How to Come Up with Good Ideas[3] and another one entitled The Super Mario Effect - Tricking Your Brain into Learning More.[23] He has also made numerous appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.[7] In 2018, it was reported that Rober had been secretly working on virtual reality projects for Apple Inc.,[24] including the company's on-board entertainment for self-driving cars, for which Rober authored two virtual reality-related patents.[25] Rober had been working for Apple since 2015, spending four years as a product designer in the special projects group, however had left his position by the beginning of 2020.[26] In 2020, Rober will star in a Discovery Channel hidden-camera show alongside Jimmy Kimmel.[27]

In October 2019, the YouTube community released a project labeled #TeamTrees in October 2019, organized by MrBeast and Rober following a tweet that suggested that MrBeast should plant 20 million trees. MrBeast and Rober partnered with YouTubers across the globe in an effort to make this come true. The goal of this project was to raise $20,000,000 for the Arbor Day Foundation by 2020, and in exchange, the Arbor Day Foundation would plant one tree for each dollar raised. Notable YouTubers who took part in the project were iJustine, the Slow Mo Guys, Marques Brownlee, Hannah Stocking, PewDiePie, The Try Guys, AsapScience, Smarter Every Day, How Ridiculous, Half as Interesting, Life Noggin, It's Okay to be Smart, and HowToBasic.[28]