That Glitter Bomb Package Thief Video: What's Inside The Box?
This week – and possibly this year – the most popular video on YouTube shows a fantastic invention made solely for revenge. And for science, of course – because what good is revenge without science? In this video, Rober displays his mechanical engineering prowess in a bid to take back his porch from the evil that is the Porch Thief. And oh, he gets his revenge. He gets his revenge REAL good.
In the video, Rober shows some videos captured with his Nest camera – that's a security cam you can buy from Nest, a Google-associated company that makes generally pretty awesome stuff. In the videos, Rober shows some porch thieves steal a package from his porch. Since the response to Rober from the police was less than satisfactory, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He created a package of pure humiliation and vigilante justice!
Rober chose an Apple HomePod box to deliver the goods. The box is white and has some rather obvious branding marks upon it – making it a real nice target for any passerby thief. Inside the box were the following components:
Mark Rober's Package Thief Glitter Bomb Components:
• 4x LG G5 smartphones (with wide-angle lenses onboard)*
• 1x Custom-made enclosure to make best use of the LG G5 phones' wide viewing angles
• Lots of glitter
• 1x Spring-locked spinning glitter launcher
• 1x Custom circuit board (something like Raspberry Pi, but custom-printed) with accelerometer onboard
• Some of that super nasty stuff called Fart Spray
• 1x GPS-tracking app
*The LG G5 is now more than a couple years old, so it's nice and inexpensive – especially if you don't mind getting one (or 4) with some cosmetic damage. If the cameras are good, why not? Even so, with these and the custom-printed and custom-engineered components aplenty, the process here for Rober wasn't inexpensive. Lucky for us, Rober has a significant amount of time available to devote to life-changing magnum opus projects such as these.
Mark Rober is a mechanical engineer. He worked for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 9 years starting in 2004, and he's one of the many brilliant folks that worked on the Mars Curiosity Rover. That's the same Curiosity Rover we've written about here on SlashGear a large number of times – the same Curiosity Rover that's currently chilling with science on the planet Mars, right now.
Fun facts: Mark Rober has a master's degree from the University of Southern California and a mechanical engineering degree from Brigham Young University. Rober also worked on JPL missions such as AMT, GRAIL, SMAP, and the Mars Science Laboratory. You might've seen Rober on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where he's shown off such inventions as his auto-bullseye dart board.
If you want to learn more about what Rober is all about, have a peek at the TED Talk – by Rober – about The Super Mario Effect (Tricking Your Brain into Learning More) from back in May of 2018 (as shown above).