When I started my adventure with VR a year ago, I thought it would be cool to create a VR resume. As with all things VR, there is so much room for disruption, and when I started showing my interactive 3D resume to folks, I got great responses. In fact, Tony Parisi saw it and within 90 seconds said “we’ve got to talk.” And soon he invited me to co-found a company. So I can say it worked for me.

I started with a 2D version. I’m an information designer, so I designed it to reflect the way resumes should be. Using a few lines and words, it re-defines the boring old resume into a timeline, statements of value, and interests. I graphed out my career based on key principles that I care about: creativity, learning, level of responsibility for organizational vision and organizational impact.

This is the ‘leave-behind’ version. The in-person interactive version has the color rectangles without the lines. On paper, since I always travel with multi-colored pens, I pull out the right pen and draw in the value lines as I discuss the areas relevant to the conversation. On my MS Surface, I draw onto it on-screen with the Surface pan.

I’m hoping that my audience will see that this gives him/her a way to quickly build a mental model of what I’ve done and how I feel about it. My experience with it has been very successful. In fact, it is surprising how little I get to describe my past: people get it, and want to launch into brainstorming what we can do together. As described in my post about information architecture, they get the ‘why’ of the big picture and the credibility of the micro picture, and the information transfer is deep and efficient.

And then, using WebGL in the browser, I pull up the 3D version and they can watch it lift off out of flat land. Here is a screen shot of an early prototype of the 3D version:

Really this is about a conversation, not just the data. To be effective when flying through the timeline in VR, I think it would need to include a master-slave shared experience, and I’ve yet to build that out.

There are many places I could take this; perhaps you have ideas. Let me know @jmarshworks.