Interview: The NASA oddball who makes "living" Christmas jumpers

Halloween parties at NASA aren’t your average fancy-dress bash - but even so, people stared when one engineer came in with a hand-made T-shirt with a “window” showing living, bleeding guts.

Mark Rober had built the T-shirt using an iPad, and a pre-made animation of internal organs - but the reaction sparked an idea. This year, he’s selling a Christmas jumpers   - and his ‘smart clothes’ have already made him a fortune.

Rober, who worked on the Mars Rover Curiosity, says he can imagine them appearing on fashion catwalks - and thinks they are just a step towards “fully technological clothing.”

“We launched these T-shirts on YouTube,” says Rober, talking to Yahoo! News. “We made our money for that video back in eight hours. I thought we might be onto something.”

The first versions had to be stuck together with duct tape, with a hole for a smartphone screen - but they made $250,000 in one year. Rober resigned, and his new Christmas range, with five £40 jumpers including a snow globe and a “creepy” Santa, is now a little more professional.

“I knew I would need to be able to dedicate more than just nights and weekends,” says Rober. “Luckily, the guys at NASA have been completely supportive and they told me I will always have a job there - but that I should go pursue this unique opportunity.”

This year’s Halloween range were more hi-tech, with an app that allowed wearers to turn on a beating heart - visible through a gap in a T-shirt - in 30 seconds, using an app. The Christmas ones are similarly easy to use.

Now Rober has Santa in his sights, "The reaction to the Christmas jumpers has been really good. The YouTube video we released one Monday is already at 25,000 views.

"My favourite is the creepy Santa one, I  really like it,” Rober says, “"Nothing is as cool as building spaceships but there is something satisfying with getting an email from a customer that says "I've never given as many high fives as I did last night wearing your shirt".

“Halloween this year was a breakthrough time for us.  The YouTube videos have over 4.5 million views now,” he says.

“We have a line of Christmas Sweaters using this technology.  Think of a fireplace with a video of an actual crackling fire in the fireplace on it,” says Rober, “Or Santa glancing round the room or a snow globe with real falling snow on your sweater.”

Rober says, though, that his favourite is the “creepy” Santa.

Even while at the agency, Rober’s odd sense of humour could be seen in his experiments - such as one where he placed rubber animal models by the side of the road and found that 6% of American drivers would swerve out of their way to hit them.

One of this year’s T-shirts was a zombie shirt which harked back to his own early, DIY efforts - just minus the work, “It only takes 30 seconds to set up - you can play a video on the app that has a beating heart with sound effects. 

Rober says that roughly half of viewers “wince” but the other half tend to “high-five”.

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Because the animations are app-controlled, they respond to commands.

 “You can control the animations using the Apple headphones concealed in your pocket.  So people will go into a room for example with a shirt of a picture of a Zombie and his eyes aren't moving… but then   the eyes start frantically looking all around the room. Then you stop them, and everyone just thinks they’ve gone crazy.”

This year’s range have sparked a huge buzz - being described as the first “smart clothes” by tech sites. Rober says he could imagine future versions of Dudz making it onto the catwalk.

“For thousands of years clothing has been static so to suddenly change that in one small sense really catches people off guard,” he says.

“I think apparel is sort of the last frontier that technology hasn't fully infiltrated our lives. This is an interim solution - until it becomes feasible to manufacture fully technological clothing.”

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