Maybe it Does Take a Rocket Scientist…

...to come up with the World's most advanced ugly Christmas sweater. There was a time, back in the day, when you could count on Mom or Grandma (or, at the very least, an aunt with too much yarn and free time) to handle all your ugly sweater needs. Alas, no more. In today's high-tech world we need to step beyond the old-school ugliness of yesteryear, and get ourselves digitally tacky.

Enter Mark Rober, and his company Digital Dudz. After spending the better part of a decade working for NASA building the Mars Curiosity and watching it being deployed to Mars, Mark was looking for another world to conquer. It seems that world is the fashion world.

As Mark explained to Wired Magazine:

It all began on Halloween in 2011, where Rober unveiled a costume like no-one had seen before. Using two iPads, one on the front and one on his back, he was able to create the illusion of seeing through his body by linking the two using FaceTime.

"I handed my phone to my wife and said, 'people love this at the party, just film this,'" he says. He put the video on YouTube and it instantly went viral, getting 1.5 million views in a day. "Everything has stemmed from that one decision."

After he rigged up the Halloween costume that became a viral hit, Mark launched Digital Dudz, which combines smartphones with sweaters and other garments that have special cut-outs which display the phones' screens. Some of the company's latest offerings include knitted holiday sweaters, albeit with a twist: animation.

One sweater has a crocheted fireplace with real-life fire footage (courtesy of a hidden phone running a free app from the company), another features Santa with animated eyes which warns, "He sees you when you're sleeping..." Other designs offer a display of an animated snow globe, a cat with moving eyes and tongue, and several others.

So, how could Mark change careers like that? As he explained to Wired Magazine,

"We spent zero dollars on advertising. We just had a YouTube video and that was it," he says. "We did a quarter million dollars in revenue, just in three weeks."