The announcement came in November with two names attached: one famous, one not, or at least not yet. The famous name was Paul McCartney. Anyone who wanted to try a virtual-reality experience starring the former Beatle — replicating the sensation of standing center stage with him as he sang "Live and Let Die" to 70,000 screaming fans — had only to download a special video file, put the file into an app for their Android phone and slip the phone into a cardboard headset designed by Google. The not-yet-famous name was of the virtual-reality production process that created this experience. Reviewers said it was "mind-blowingly cool" and an "exciting preview of the future," but it was also so novel that it had been hard to think of a word to label it. Its inventors had wanted a name that would lodge in the public consciousness the same way Dolby and Imax and Blu-ray had. A name that could become a verb as well as a noun. An iconic name. A name for the ages.
Finding such a name wasn't easy. Starting in April 2013, the production process itself went through what has become a fairly standard development story for tech start-ups: The three founders — Tom Annau, Jens Christensen and Arthur van Hoff, all computer scientists and "resident entrepreneurs" at a venture-capital firm called Redpoint — began with a flash of insight, then wrote code for the software, then assembled a hardware prototype, then raised more than $34 million from investors, including Google. But initially, they couldn't come up with a name. The three batted around a few possibilities, Christensen says, but it "very quickly became apparent we weren't going anywhere. We really needed help." They had already hired a San Francisco-based branding and design agency called Character to help shepherd their production process to the marketplace, and it was Character that took them to Anthony Shore.
Shore, 47, is what is known in the arcane world of corporate branding as a namer. He is boyish, ebullient and voluble, which is only natural for someone who makes his living from words. As a child, Shore found himself entranced by language, and when he received the American Heritage Dictionary as a birthday present, he pored over a supplement on the roots of Indo-European words in much the manner that other kids memorized batting averages. (He still has the book on a shelf in his office in Oakland, Calif.) He studied linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and wrote a senior thesis on Latin and moraic theory. There wasn't a lot of work for linguists, so he fell back on another preoccupation, fonts, and became a typesetter for a real estate magazine. Typesetting led him to graphic design, graphic design led him briefly to advertising and advertising led him to naming, beginning with cocktails at Hotel De Anza in San Jose. Shore spent 13 years at one of the oldest and largest branding firms, Landor Associates, and a year at the branding behemoth Lexicon before deciding in 2009 to open his own one-man naming agency, Operative Words.
Now he met the three entrepreneurs at their office in Menlo Park. They showed him their 32-lens camera — "something that looked like Sputnik," Shore says — then he put on a headset, and they fired up a standard-issue V.R. demo. He was immediately teleported to a computer-generated Tuscan villa. Shore was impressed. But still, it looked like a computer game.
The engineers then loaded a new file, and when Shore looked around the room through the headset, he saw the three inventors tossing a Nerf ball. Only they weren't. Shore was watching a virtual-reality movie of them tossing a Nerf ball. This time Shore was astonished. "It was completely real," he says. "It was transportive."
Shore had named everything from companies to products to websites to ingredients to colors. He was responsible for some 160 distinct names in all, including SoyJoy (the health bar), Lytro (the camera) and Yum! (the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell), as well as lesser-known names like Avaya, Enormo, Fanhattan, Freescale, Homestyler, Kixx, Mylo, Pause, Rig, Scribe, Spontania, Valchemy, Wanderful and Zact. But the new V.R. production process posed a particular challenge. It was manifestly different, Shore told himself. It could have a profound influence on entertainment culture and on how people connect with one another. He needed a name that would convey its magnitude — a great name.
