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Mark Rober

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Mark Rober
Rober in 2019
Born
Orange County, California
NationalityAmerican
Alma materBrigham Young University
University of Southern California
Occupation(s)Engineer
Inventor
YouTube Personality
Known forSocial Media videos
Digital Dudz
Mars Rover
SpouseLisa Rober
Children1
YouTube information
Also known asMark Rober
Channel
Years active2011–present
GenreScience & Technology
Subscribers13.3 million[1][2]
Total views1.3 billion[1][2]
Associated acts
100,000 subscribers
1,000,000 subscribers
10,000,000 subscribers
Last updated: July 24, 2020
Websiteyoutube.com/MarkRober
markroberbuildinstructions.com

Mark Rober is an American YouTuber, engineer and inventor. He is known for his YouTube videos on popular science, do-it-yourself gadgets and creative ideas. Several of his videos have gone viral, including a digital Halloween costume, and a trap for package thieves that releases a fountain of ultra-fine glitter. Before YouTube, Rober was an engineer with NASA where he spent seven years working on the Curiosity rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He later worked for four years at Apple Inc. as a product designer in their Special Projects Group, where he authored patents involving virtual reality in self-driving cars. In October 2019, Rober was integral in launching the environmental fundraiser #teamtrees, alongside YouTuber MrBeast.

Early life

Rober grew up in Orange County, California. As a kid, he began tinkering with engineering, including making a pair of goggles that helped avoid tears while cutting onions.[3] He earned a mechanical engineering degree from Brigham Young University and a master's degree from the University of Southern California.[4]

Career

Early career (NASA)

Rober joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 2004.[5] He worked there for nine years, seven of which were spent working on the Curiosity rover, which is now on Mars.[4] He designed and delivered hardware on several JPL missions, including AMT, GRAIL, SMAP, and Mars Science Laboratory.[6] While at NASA, Rober was one of the primary architects for "JPL Wired", which was a comprehensive knowledge capture wiki.[6] He published a case study about applying wiki technology in a high-tech organization to develop an "Intrapedia" for the capture of corporate knowledge.[7]

YouTube channel, science communication

During his time at NASA, Rober began making viral videos.[3] His videos cover a wide variety of topics, sparking ideas for April Fools' Day pranks[8][9] and teaching about tricks like beating an escape room and filming primates in zoos non-invasively.[3] He advocates for science, making videos testing the ability for sharks to smell blood in water,[10] fluidized sand[11] and water purification.[12]

In 2011, Rober recorded his first YouTube video involving a Halloween costume, involving two iPads which created the illusion of seeing through his body.[13] 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.[14][15] 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.[13][16][17] 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,[18] and in 2013 Rober sold the company to UK-based costume company Morphsuits.[16]

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.[19] The contraption engineered by Rober would explode glitter, emit a foul odor, and record the thieves during the process.[20] 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.[20][21] Rober posted a follow-up to this video in December 2019, teaming up with Macaulay Culkin and featuring an improved design.[22]

In addition to YouTube, Rober has contributed articles to Men's Health,[23] and gave a TEDx presentation in 2015 How to Come Up with Good Ideas[4] and another one entitled The Super Mario Effect - Tricking Your Brain into Learning More.[24] He has also made numerous appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.[8] In 2018, it was reported that Rober had been secretly working on virtual reality projects for Apple Inc.,[25] including the company's on-board entertainment for self-driving cars, for which Rober authored two virtual reality-related patents.[26] 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.[27] In 2020, Rober will star in a Discovery Channel hidden-camera show alongside Jimmy Kimmel.[28]

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.[29]

Personal life

Rober moved to the city of Sunnyvale, California in 2015, where he lives with his wife and son.[27] In order to raise awareness about autism, Rober tweeted out his support for those with autism, referencing his son who has the condition.[30]

In August 2020, during a video filming sharks in the Bahamas, Rober revealed that he tested positive for COVID-19, delaying production of his video.[31]

References

  1. ^ a b "About". SocialBlade. Retrieved July 24, 2020.
  2. ^ a b "About onemeeeliondollars". YouTube.
  3. ^ a b c Hart, Hugh (16 February 2012). "Dirt-Cheap iPhone Trick Captures Great Ape Close-Ups". Wired. Retrieved 3 May 2016.
  4. ^ a b c TEDx Talks (2 July 2015). "How To Come Up With Good Ideas - Mark Rober - TEDxYouth@ColumbiaSC". YouTube. Retrieved 4 May 2016.
  5. ^ Diaz, Jesus (16 August 2012). "Seven Years In the Life of One of the Engineers of the Mars Curiosity Rover". Gizmodo. Retrieved May 3, 2016.
  6. ^ a b Verville, Jon; Jones, Patricia M.; Rober, Mark. "Why Wikis at NASA?". NASA. Retrieved May 4, 2016.
  7. ^ Rober, Mark B.; Cooper, Lynne P. (2011). "Capturing Knowledge via an "Intrapedia": A Case Study" (PDF). Proceedings of the 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE. pp. 1–10. ISSN 1530-1605. Retrieved December 18, 2018.
  8. ^ a b Worland, Justin (March 31, 2016). "Let a NASA Nerd Show You Some Easy and Awesome April Fools' Pranks". Time. Retrieved May 4, 2016.
  9. ^ Spence, Shay (September 3, 2015). "Skinning a Watermelon Is Your New Labor Day Party Trick". People. Retrieved May 4, 2016.
  10. ^ Fink, Jenni (July 29, 2019). "Shark Week Fact Vs. Fiction: Former NASA Engineer Tests If Sharks Can Smell a Drop of Blood in Ocean". Newsweek. Retrieved February 17, 2020.
  11. ^ Stewart, Jessica (December 4, 2017). "Ex-NASA Engineer Uses Science to Transform Hot Tub Full of Sand into "Liquid Soup"". My Modern Met. Retrieved February 17, 2020.
  12. ^ Future of Philanthropy (March 12, 2019). "How Bill Gates ended up eating pizza rolls on YouTube". Fast Company. Retrieved February 17, 2020.
  13. ^ a b Shubber, Kadhim (23 August 2013). "Mark Rober left Nasa to make awesome wearable tech Halloween costumes". Wired UK. Retrieved May 3, 2016.
  14. ^ Johnson, Charity (2 October 2015). "Go Hi-Tech This Halloween With These DIY Costume Videos". Tech Times. Retrieved May 4, 2016.
  15. ^ Kelly, Heather (18 October 2013). "Smartphone wounds and other high-tech Halloween tricks". CNN. Retrieved May 4, 2016.
  16. ^ a b Clark, Patrick (October 18, 2013). "A NASA Engineer Builds a Better Halloween Costume". Bloomberg News. Retrieved May 3, 2016.
  17. ^ Pepitone, Julianne (12 December 2014). "Digitally animated ugly Christmas sweaters bring the kitsch to a new level". Today. Retrieved May 4, 2016.
  18. ^ Digital Dudz. "Select Digital Dudz Media Coverage 2013- Incld GMA, TODAY, Leno, Miley". YouTube. Retrieved May 4, 2016.
  19. ^ Kleinman, Zoe (December 18, 2018). "Glitter bomb tricks parcel thieves". BBC News. Retrieved December 19, 2018.
  20. ^ a b Shannon, Joel (23 January 2019). "Viral glitter bomb video featured fake thieves, creator admits in apology". USA Today.
  21. ^ "A glitter bomb makes for sweet revenge on a package thief". Considerable. January 23, 2019.
  22. ^ Scribner, Herb (December 18, 2019). "BYU grad and former NASA engineer teams with Macaulay Culkin for new viral decoy porch prank". Deseret News. Retrieved February 17, 2020.
  23. ^ "Author: Mark Rober". Men's Health. Retrieved May 3, 2016.
  24. ^ TEDx Talks (May 31, 2018), The Super Mario Effect - Tricking Your Brain into Learning More | Mark Rober | TEDxPenn, retrieved October 29, 2018
  25. ^ Roettgers, Janko (26 June 2018). "YouTuber Mark Rober Secretly Develops VR for Self-Driving Cars for Apple (EXCLUSIVE)". Variety. Retrieved February 17, 2020.
  26. ^ Aiello, Chloe (June 26, 2018). "A YouTube star with more than 3 million followers has reportedly been working at Apple in secret". CNBC. Retrieved February 17, 2020.
  27. ^ a b Towne, Erika (February 5, 2020). "Sunnyvale Resident Glitter Bombs Package Thieves, Gets Discovery Channel Show". The Silicon Valley Voice. Retrieved February 17, 2020.
  28. ^ Andreeva, Nellie (December 17, 2019). "Jimmy Kimmel Prank Series 'Revenge Of the Nerd' Starring YouTuber Mark Rober Ordered By Discovery". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved February 18, 2020.
  29. ^ "#teamtrees". Retrieved October 25, 2019.
  30. ^ Rober, Mark [@MarkRober] (2 Apr 2018). "Happy Autism awareness day/month. The best part of my day is the 20-minute nighttime routine with my son and his stuffed animals. Repetition doesn't bother him (in fact he prefers it) so my same jokes totally kill every night" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  31. ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vePc5V4h_kg
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