By Zach Miller
Aubrey Yung is a Google Search Central Gold Product Expert, SEO strategist, and co-founder of NT Studio, home to XR and spatial computing experiences. She has built a career that connects technical SEO, multilingual search strategy, and immersive technology. Her work spans industries such as FinTech, SaaS, healthcare, travel, and e-commerce. Through her consultancy platform, she helps companies solve technical SEO challenges and improve organic growth.
Aubrey’s path into the industry was unexpected. She studied sociology and comparative literature at The University of Hong Kong before moving into SEO and digital strategy. Over time, her interest in language, culture, and human behavior shaped the way she approaches search and technology. Her work explores how people interact with information, stories, and digital environments in new ways. In this interview, Aubrey discusses her journey across disciplines, the future of immersive storytelling, and the balance between technical thinking and creative exploration in fast-changing industries.
Q1. Aubrey, your path into SEO and immersive technology is far from conventional. From studying sociology and comparative literature in Hong Kong to building multilingual SEO campaigns and later co-founding NT Studio, what were the defining moments that shaped your identity as both a technical strategist and a creative founder?
Aubrey Yung: I think the defining thread has always been curiosity about how people make meaning.
Studying sociology and comparative literature trained me to look at systems, culture, language, and human behavior. At the time, I did not see that as “technical” training, but later I realized it shaped the way I approach search, product, and storytelling. SEO, at its core, is about understanding how people express needs through language and how systems interpret those signals.
Working in SEO lets me see how complex search becomes when you are working across languages, markets, regulations, and user expectations. It was not just about ranking pages. It was about building systems that could help people in different countries find the right information at the right moment.
Co-founding NT Studio added another layer. It pushed me from optimizing existing digital journeys to creating new ones. With immersive technology, especially XR and spatial computing, you are not only asking, “How do people find this?” but also, “How do they feel inside this experience?” That combination of technical structure, cultural understanding, and creative execution has shaped how I see myself today: someone who moves between strategy and storytelling, systems and emotion.
Q2. In previous conversations, you discussed structured data, international SEO, and multilingual search strategy in depth. What’s interesting here is the crossover point: when did you first realize that the principles behind search behavior and discoverability could directly influence how users experience immersive XR environments and spatial computing products?
Aubrey Yung: In SEO, we spend a lot of time thinking about intent: what people are looking for, what language they use, what context they are in, and what kind of answer would feel useful. When I began working on immersive experiences, I noticed the same questions appearing in a different form. In XR, users are navigating space, making visual choices, responding to cues, and forming mental maps of an environment.
Structured data also influenced my thinking here. It teaches you to make meaning explicit for machines. Spatial computing asks a similar question, but in a more embodied way: how do we organize information, objects, scenes, and interactions so that both people and systems can understand them?
That was the crossover point for me. Search behavior is really about how people seek meaning. XR is about how people move through meaning. Once I saw that connection, it became clear that SEO principles like intent, hierarchy, context, localization, and relevance could help shape better immersive products.
Q3. How do you personally balance precision-driven thinking with creative experimentation when leading projects across your consultancy platform and NT Studio, especially in an industry where technology evolves faster than audience behavior?
Aubrey Yung: I try to separate the parts of a project that need precision from the parts that need exploration.
For SEO and consultancy work, precision matters because clients need clarity, measurable outcomes, and systems that can scale. You need strong technical foundations, clean information architecture, structured data, localization logic, and a way to evaluate performance. That side of my work is very disciplined.
But creative experimentation is equally important, especially in XR. New technologies often arrive before audiences know exactly what they want from them. That means you cannot only rely on existing playbooks. You have to prototype, test, observe, and sometimes build before the market has the vocabulary to describe the need.
The balance comes from using strategy as a container for creativity. I like to define the user problem, the constraints, and the success signals clearly. Within that structure, there should be room to experiment with format, interaction, emotion, and storytelling. I do not see precision and creativity as opposites. Precision helps you know what you are testing. Creativity helps you discover what is possible.
Q4. In earlier interviews surrounding NT Studio’s Vision Pro projects, much of the discussion focused on innovation and product execution. Looking beyond the launch phase, what have you learned about building trust and human connection inside XR experiences, particularly as conversations around virtual identity continue to grow?
Aubrey Yung: One thing I have learned is that immersion alone does not create trust. A product can be visually impressive and technically advanced, but users still need to feel safe, oriented, and respected inside the experience.
In XR, trust is built through many small design decisions. How much control does the user have? Do they understand what is happening? Is the environment intuitive? Does the experience respect their attention, privacy, identity, and personal space? These questions become even more important when virtual identity is involved, because people are not just interacting with content; they may be representing themselves in new ways.
Human connection in XR also depends on emotional clarity. The best immersive experiences are not only about novelty. They give people a reason to care. That could come through storytelling, social presence, cultural familiarity, or a sense of agency.
For NT Studio, the launch phase taught us how to execute quickly, but the longer-term lesson is that meaningful XR experiences need more than innovation. They need empathy. They need thoughtful interaction design. And they need to make users feel that technology is extending their human experience, not replacing it.
Q5. You often speak about localization, cultural nuance, and understanding user intent across global markets. How do you think the future of digital storytelling will change when spatial computing begins adapting experiences based on cultural behavior, language patterns, and personalized search intent?
Aubrey Yung: I think digital storytelling will become much more contextual and participatory.
Traditional localization often starts with language, but true localization goes deeper. It includes cultural references, emotional tone, user expectations, visual symbols, social norms, and even different ways of navigating information. Spatial computing could make those differences much more visible because the experience is no longer confined to a screen. It can adapt through space, sound, gesture, environment, and interaction.
When spatial experiences begin responding to cultural behavior and personalized intent, storytelling may become less linear. Instead of everyone receiving the same narrative, users may enter a story through different pathways depending on their context, language, goals, or cultural background.
But I also think this future requires responsibility. Personalization should not reduce people to data patterns or stereotypes. The challenge is to design adaptive experiences that feel respectful, inclusive, and transparent. The opportunity is huge: stories can become more relevant and more emotionally resonant. But the best spatial storytelling will still need human judgment, cultural sensitivity, and strong creative direction.
Q6. Many founders are forced to choose between becoming highly specialized and building across multiple disciplines. You have managed to move between SEO strategy, XR product development, film production, and emerging technology research. In the future, what impact do you hope it leaves on the next generation of creators and technologists?
Aubrey Yung: I hope it shows that interdisciplinary paths are not a weakness. They can be a source of originality.
A lot of innovation happens at the edges between fields. SEO taught me how people search for information. Film and storytelling taught me how people feel and interpret meaning. XR product development taught me how people interact with digital environments. Emerging technology research keeps reminding me that the tools will keep changing, but human behavior changes more slowly.
For the next generation of creators and technologists, I hope they feel encouraged to build across disciplines without feeling they have to fit into one narrow identity. Specialization is valuable, but so is translation: the ability to connect ideas, people, and systems that do not usually speak the same language.
The impact I hope to leave is not just through specific products or campaigns, but through a way of working. Be curious and human-centered. The future will need people who can understand both machines and meaning. That is where I think the most interesting work will happen.
Connecting Technology, Culture, and Human Understanding
Aubrey Yung’s journey shows how technology, creativity, and human understanding can work together in meaningful ways when fueled by curiosity, careful research, and a strong understanding of culture and behavior. Throughout the interview, Aubrey highlights the importance of designing experiences that feel useful, respectful, and emotionally clear. She believes technology should support human connection. That perspective appears in both her SEO consultancy work and the projects developed through NT Studio. Her story encourages future creators and technologists to stay curious, experiment across fields, and think beyond traditional career paths.
