An Architect Wants to Use AI to Rebuild a North American "Xiaohongshu"

"Let AI strengthen human agency." By Zhiyan Chen

An AI product called Viba is now running closed beta tests across eight core cities in North America.

At first glance, Viba looks like a real-life version of Miracle Nikki — users input a specific scenario, then click and drag to try on different personalized outfits. Viba builds personalized models by deeply capturing the visual context from users' photo albums, automatically recommending scene-matched content based on their city, social role, and interests. It supports direct purchase through affiliated links, closing the loop from inspiration to consumption decision.

The product has attracted roughly 1,000 core seed users, with each user generating over 14 personalized "aesthetic assets" on the platform per week on average.

Behind Viba is N7 Interactive, a startup founded in 2024. Its founder is Qianhui Liang. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in architecture from Tongji University, then pursued an interdisciplinary program in computer science and design at the MIT Media Lab, with research focused on "aesthetic parameterization." Before founding N7 Interactive, she worked at Huawei's terminal imaging department.

Liang is trying to fill a massive vacuum in the North American market with Viba. "For a long time, North America has lacked a platform like Xiaohongshu that can carry authentic life inspiration with a real community atmosphere. Instagram has fallen into a zero-sum game of influencer fame; TikTok grabs attention through shock value; and Pinterest is more like a cold scrapbook."

"The new generation needs products that center more on the personalized self. From Gen Z/Alpha digital natives consuming AI, we see huge demand for users to spontaneously input context, continuously explore and discover themselves, and interact within vertical scenarios of their real-world IRL lives," she told An Yong Waves, hoping Viba can become the next-generation "aesthetic context engine" — lowering the barrier to aesthetics through AIGC, democratizing imagination, and giving people more richness in the real world.

Recently, An Yong Waves sat down with Liang and her team in Shanghai to talk about Viba, and that last "line of defense" distinguishing humans from AI that countless people have mentioned — aesthetics.

Part 01

North America Desperately Needs a Xiaohongshu

An Yong: What are Viba's beta metrics so far?

Liang: We've tested with 1,000 core users across eight North American cities including New York and Los Angeles. Our North Star metric is "personal asset accumulation" — the images users save after projecting themselves through Viba. The average user collects 14.7 images per week, with heavy users reaching 20 or more.

An Yong: Viba looks like a real-life Miracle Nikki. Is a real-person dress-up game really that appealing?

Liang: The user motivation lies in presenting an "ideal self." In Western culture, having a clear visual aesthetic stance is considered very "cool" — this aesthetic stance is social currency. Users might not own that piece of clothing in real life, but on Viba they can first build this taste, then share and remix it, creating a natural interactive loop.

An Yong: So it's just sharing AI-generated outfits in a community?

Liang: It's more than that. Over 30 emerging designer brands have already joined Viba, we have exclusive data integrations with international top fashion groups, and we've connected with a base pool of over 100,000 individual items — a number that's still growing. The styling options we currently offer are all directly purchasable on Viba. Viba doesn't follow a pure traffic-ad model; it cuts directly into consumption decisions. In North America, affiliate marketing is a very mature ecosystem. When AI generates styling inspiration for a specific scenario, we directly link to the product database.

An Yong: Sounds like you're building a North American Xiaohongshu?

Liang: In some ways, yes. Young people in North America are actually incredibly vibrant, but their expression is suppressed by existing platforms. Instagram is now purely "influencer logic" and "fandom logic" — if you don't fit that polished influencer aesthetic, you don't get attention. Pinterest lacks social attributes; people look at images there, but the discussion flows to Reddit.

An Yong: People discuss outfits on Reddit?

Liang: Yes, you might find it hard to imagine, but on Reddit — which has such a strong "tech bro" identity — FashionWear is actually one of its top 100 subreddits. It has hundreds of millions of subscribers, where people very seriously discuss styling combinations.

So North America actually has a gap in "aesthetic inspiration + community interaction." What Viba wants to fill is exactly this void — we position ourselves as users' "bestie," providing strongly local, strongly real-life inspiration through AI. We want to reconstruct that "authentic, useful, communal" Xiaohongshu experience through AIGC.

An Yong: Can a platform like this work today on the AI concept alone?

Liang: Ethnic minorities are Viba's current entry point. We've found that North America's diverse ethnic groups — for example, Latinos retain significant cultural traits in their identity, yet in a mainstream aesthetic-dominated market, there's no good content supply to meet their aesthetic demands. Among young people in North America, Latinos account for 30%, with considerable purchasing power, and because of higher birth rates, they're the fastest-growing demographic.

An Yong: Who's using Viba in the beta?

Liang: The beta phase happened to coincide with American spring break. We found many users constantly trying on specific beach dress combinations on Viba. Because every beach has a different vibe, users need to complete this "scene compatibility" experiment in the digital world before departure, to gain that more certain pleasure in reality.

There are many more special examples. One that deeply impressed me was a British user who had worked at Google for over a decade. He had just completed his gender transition surgery. To celebrate this life milestone, he planned to throw a party. To use our product, he specifically went out and bought an iPhone. Every day he tried various looks on Viba. He was essentially sketching out "who he was about to become," establishing an entirely new identity through aesthetics.

In San Francisco there's also an artist who is slightly balding, so he's always been very cautious with his outfits — either minimalist or completely unchanging. But he's always wanted to try an "underground country cowboy" style, because he was born in Austin. He hoped to look grounded, ready to get his hands dirty at any moment, while still maintaining an artist's cool. After repeatedly experimenting on Viba, he actually took action in real life, even getting his ears pierced for it.

An Yong: Will Viba give everyone a different new persona?

Liang: I love a film called About Time. It talks about how everyone's dates feel like there's a real "Inside Out" operation going on — there are actually several versions of you in your brain.

The truth is, we're completely different in every social role. Me as a founder facing colleagues, versus me as a daughter facing my parents, or me going on a date with a guy — completely different profiles. Algorithms' so-called "personalization" used to mean sticking a static label on you, but real people are composed of countless life slices. Outfit styling is essentially the inspiration-seeding of these life moments; it can very precisely capture your self in different social scenarios.

An Yong: What does this mining of human multiplicity ultimately lead to?

Liang: It leads to a strengthening of agency.

Part 02

Augmented Intelligence, Not Artificial Intelligence

An Yong: I notice that even though you're building an AI product, you've repeatedly emphasized Viba's impact on the real world and real people. Why?

Liang: The product idea for Viba came from a trip to Spain. I discovered I had packed entirely the wrong luggage. The local architecture in Spain has a very unique clay style, with an overall yellowish tone, and a camel coat I brought completely didn't match in that light and shadow environment.

An Yong: That reminds me of all those videos where people will do anything for the perfect shot.

Liang: What I realized was that visual context has enormous value for building a person's personalized model. But this connection has never been deeply excavated. I believe the real opportunity of AIGC lies in connecting digital interaction with physical world assets, thereby distributing so-called consumption intent.

I've always believed in what Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, said: Augment Intelligence, not Artificial Intelligence.

AI shouldn't make people disappear into a digital cage; it should enhance human agency in the physical world. Just as the invention of photography in the 19th century gave rise to Impressionism — when machines could accomplish "recording," people instead returned to pursuing scarce things like subjective perception and fleeting moments of light. I hope Viba can become a calibration tool, helping users regain that feel-good certainty in reality, giving them motivation to walk out the door and explore the real world.

An Yong: What do you think is the aesthetic orientation behind the "must get the shot" mentality?

Liang: Fake it till you make it! I think it's fine — starting from a 2.5D beauty to a real-life state is essentially a form of self-pleasing advance consumption.

An Yong: If the "me" in the generated image looks so good, won't people become more afraid to step into reality?

Liang: Quite the opposite. We've found that when users see themselves wearing a certain style, appearing at a local beach on Viba, they actually become more motivated to walk out the door and truly have that experience. Often what people lack isn't money, but motivation to explore life. We use AI to help users eliminate this uncertainty, making them more confident and more willing to socialize in reality.

In the AI era, human agency becomes extremely scarce. I hope Viba can give users a sense of "certainty" and "security."

An Yong: From a business perspective, is this AI-to-reality connection also necessary?

Liang: I think it's not only necessary, but the core of reshaping supply-demand relationships in the AI era. Because real-world context is extremely fragmented and strongly culturally attributed — what you wear at Santa Monica Beach versus what you wear on the streets of London involves completely different aesthetic languages.

From a business standpoint, this is our opportunity. Through this content loop, we accumulate users' preferences in the real world. When AI can better understand your memory and identity, it becomes more efficient at the "inspiration-seeding" stage.

And I've always had one conviction: in the future, "goods" will become increasingly worthless, but "the narrative of goods" will become extremely expensive. We use AIGC to connect this narrative with physical world assets — possibly a designer piece, possibly an offline event venue. This is essentially distributing an intent, not just generating a pretty picture. Only when AI walks into reality can it truly complete the commercial loop from inspiration to transaction.

An Yong: If major companies and giants also enter Viba's track, do you think Viba has moats?

Liang: Giants find it hard to move their own core business. Our moat lies in "the engineering of aesthetics": we've cast a wide net of real North American diverse-ethnicity users, deconstructed their life slices, and let AI learn those extremely subtle visual languages with local subcultural characteristics. This mastery of "vibe" isn't something you can solve by throwing compute at it.

Part 03

From Architect, to Engineer, to Entrepreneur

An Yong: Before Viba, you made a Vision Pro app called Sceno, very much like an any-door to the real world. What were you thinking then?

Liang: Sceno was our first product launched in 2024; it was once the most popular imaging community on Vision Pro. The core concept was very intuitive: "One photo takes you back to where it was taken."

The idea's birth actually carried strong sensory impact from the technology. When I experienced it at Apple's Lab and saw my photo album in Vision Pro for the first time, when a huge panorama appeared before me, that immersive feeling made you feel as if you had truly returned to the scene. I immediately realized that for immersive devices with still-low early penetration, they must切入 through personalized needs, and the content people care about most and are most moved by is actually their own memories.

Sceno was an independent imaging community where users shared the worlds they had seen. For example, clicking on Manhattan on a map, you could see moments captured by different people at different times — this connection based on shared location memory is incredibly powerful.

An Yong: Did Sceno influence Viba?

Liang: Working on Sceno led me to a core discovery in business logic — photo albums and other visual content actually excavate a person's life path. Through users' synced photo albums spanning over a decade, you can almost map out their extremely stable interests, important relationships, and unique lifestyle. The enormous value contained in this visual context became the inspirational starting point for Viba later on.

An Yong: Returning to your experience — from Tongji architecture to MIT computer science, to Huawei engineer, to entrepreneur — that's quite a span.

Liang: Architects create things in the physical world, influencing others' lives. At MIT, I began thinking about how to digitize and parameterize this "beauty." My experience at Huawei's camera department taught me: how to find the most suitable aesthetic parameters for every scenario among hundreds of millions of people through computational photography.

An Yong: Interdisciplinary career changes can't have been easy.

Liang: It was genuinely very painful at the time — completely stepping out of my comfort zone. As someone who hadn't studied math in college, I had to take Computer Science 101 with a bunch of MIT geniuses, barely scraping by on the final exam. But the most important thing MIT Media Lab taught me is "radical optimism": technology shaped by responsibility and imagination can promote social prosperity. The culture there is "Deploy or Die" — it demands not just ideas, but the ability to show them, to concretely implement and deploy them. This is what I understand as the origin of entrepreneurial spirit.

An Yong: Your background is very "elite," and you've consistently emphasized aesthetics, but Viba is ultimately a consumer product. Could your background be an obstacle to understanding mass demand?

Liang: On the contrary, I believe curiosity about the world's diversity transcends these so-called "obstacles." I deeply admire architects Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin — their protection of Beijing's city walls wasn't just for aesthetics, but because that was a guardianship of human memory.

An Yong: From an entrepreneur's perspective, how would you describe yourself?

Liang: I consider myself a go-getter. During the 2020 pandemic, I initiated a donation of anti-epidemic materials to Wuhan through MIT CEO, overcoming various difficulties to transport 3,000 sets of protective suits back to Wuhan and Huanggang during the Spring Festival. That experience's greatest impact on me was: if what you're doing is impactful enough, you can mobilize energy far beyond your own circle.

An Yong: Is impact the core driver of your entrepreneurship?

Liang: From the heart, greater impact has always been my core driver.**

This obsession can be traced back to when I chose architecture. I've always felt architects are tremendously great, because even after you leave this world, the works you leave behind continue to profoundly influence many people's urban lives.

Later, when I saw Figma go public last year, I was also deeply moved. Because you see a product that can truly change many industries, genuinely influencing millions upon millions of people.

For me, entrepreneurship is the most direct path to achieving this impact. Whether building houses in the physical world before, or making AI products in the digital world now, my underlying logic has always been the same: I hope to personally build something, to create beauty and joy, to make the beautiful experiences brought by technology become a real, distributable energy.

Layout by Meng Du | Image source: IC Photo

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