Mark Rober

Early life and NASA

Rober grew up in Orange County, California. He earned a mechanical engineering degree from Brigham Young University and a Master's degree from the University of Southern California.

Rober joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 2004. He worked there for 9 years, 7 of which were spent working on the Curiosity rover, which is now on Mars. He designed and delivered hardware on several JPL missions, including AMT, GRAIL, SMAP, and Mars Science Laboratory.

YouTube videos

What started as a single YouTube video of Rober's iPad Halloween costume soon turned into a series of videos that attracted significant attention from the public and the media.

The videos cover a wide variety of topics. Some are simply original and fun, such as his ideas for April Fools' Day pranks or skinned watermelons; yet others show how to make useful gadgets for various purposes, such as a snowball machine gun fashioned from a leaf blower and non-invasive filming of primates in zoos; finally, Rober makes popular science videos, such as egg drop competition ideas and a scale model of the Solar System showing the distance of Planet Nine using a drone. Rober summarized his approach: "I love to take something very commonplace and reuse it in an original way."

Digital Dudz

On Halloween 2011, Rober placed one iPad on the front and one on his back, and created the illusion of seeing through his body by linking the two using the FaceTime video chatting app. He posted the video of the "gaping hole in torso" costume on YouTube and it immediately went viral, receiving 1.5 million views in just one day.

When he launched Digital Dudz on 3 October 2012 and started selling costumes online, Rober was still doing it in his spare time. With the YouTube video as the only advertising, Digital Dudz earned a quarter million dollars in three weeks. In 2013, his costumes had pockets sewn into the insides and were being carried in hundreds of Party City stores and other specialty shops across the U.S. By August 2013, the app was downloaded a quarter of a million times. Rober holds a patent for the integration of apps with clothing and costumes.

Rober sold Digital Dudz in 2013 to British costume-maker Morphsuits and left his job at NASA to join the company as chief creative officer. He signed a deal with Disney to create augmented outfits modeled on Marvel Comics superheroes.

Digital Dudz costumes were featured on CBS News, CNN, The Jay Leno Show, Fox, Yahoo! News, Discovery Channel, The Today Show, GMA, and dozens of other media channels.

Other activities

Rober is the host of a popular science TV show on the Science Channel called The Quick And The Curious. He contributed articles to Men's Health. He gave a TED speech entitled How To Come Up With Good Ideas. He has also made numerous appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

While at NASA, Rober was one of the primary architects for "JPL Wired", which was a comprehensive knowledge capture wiki. He published a case study about applying wiki technology in a high-tech organization to develop an "Intrapedia" for the capture of corporate knowledge.

Personal life

Rober lives in the Bay Area with his wife and son.