The HomePod Glitter Bomb Video Had Some Staged Reactions, Creator Apologizes

Remember that glorious HomePod ‘glitter bomb’ video created by former NASA and current Apple engineer, Mark Rober? Well, it turns out some of the reactions weren’t exactly real, but staged, as discovered by Internet sleuths.

According to BuzzFeed News, a man named Peter Logan emailed the publication sharing an Imgur album, detailing screenshots of Google Street View and the glitter bomb video, suggesting the second and third reactions in the video were linked to Rober’s friend Cici—and possibly took place at the latter’s home.

Check out the convincing images below:

Suspicious coincidences in the Glitter Bomb video – caution: wild-ass guessing and uninformed speculation within

Of course, Rober investigated and released a statement on the matter, admitting he didn’t know some of the reactions recorded from Cici were staged. He also disclosed he paid Cici for any footage of any glitter bomb reactions taken from her house. Turns out two of the reactions were friends of Cici’s volunteering for reactions.

“It appears (and I’ve since confirmed) in these two cases, the “thieves” were actually acquaintances of the person helping me,” explains Rober.

Rober eventually removed the ‘faked’ reactions from his original video, in an effort to keep his overall video genuine.

I posted this as a comment response to my recent viral tweet/video but I’m posting it as a new tweet as well: pic.twitter.com/g2VHsQWh1z

— Mark Rober (@MarkRober) December 20, 2018

Rober has gained well over 1.1 million YouTube subscribers since the HomePod glitter bomb video’s release on December 17th, while the video itself has over 46.5 million views so far.



While a couple of the reactions were faked, it doesn’t take away from Rober’s engineering of the device, which he says is real and cost him lots of time and money:

It genuinely works (like all the other things I’ve built on my channel) and we’ve made all the code and build info public. Again, I’m sorry for putting something up on my channel that was misleading. That is totally on me and I will take all necessary steps to make sure it won’t happen again.

Don’t believe anything you see on the Internet, folks! Nevertheless, this HomePod glitter bomb is still a pretty ruthless creation, which people want to buy.