Pointopia — Haochen(Jimmy) Xu

Haochen(Jimmy) Xu

jimmyhcx@gmail.com
@jimmyhcx
/in/jimmyhcx

Unreal Director · Cinematic Environment Designer

Bridging storytelling, space, and atmosphere through real-time worldbuilding.

With a foundation in architecture, I build immersive visual environments where narrative design, spatial composition, and atmospheric cues work together to shape perception and emotion.

My practice integrates layout, shot design, and virtual camera work to translate narrative mood into spatial experience.

I aim to contribute to cinematic worldbuilding across film, games, and virtual production—while continuing to explore how digital space shapes memory, perception, and experience.

Focus & Research Interests

Spatial storytelling, real-time cinematic environments, digital memory,
atmospheric worldbuilding, perception, and object agency in virtual space.

CV

CONTACT

POINTOPIA

BACK

POINTOPIA
Unreal Lidar Visual/Digital reconstruction

Co-Designer
Sep 2023-Dec 2023

Created by:
Haochen Xu
Firdavs Yuldashev

DESCRIPTION

Our goal was to explore point cloud as a design tool and a universal system where all types of models can unify. Downgrading and simplifying everything into a single point cloud could open up more opportunities for us to imagine more complex landscapes. Formats like mesh and NURBS overcomplicate the process for us and, as a result, restrict the level of complexity we can achieve when modeling. So the answer may not be making the workflow more complex, but rather reducing it to a point cloud and using it as a universal unit. The potential of the point cloud also lies in the fact that the differences between all the models that are crafted, scanned, or AI-generated can become indistinguishable. At the beginning of the semester, we picked and documented the abandoned Hawthorne Mall as our site of choice. Using a Leica LiDAR scanner, we were able to capture a point-cloud 3D scan of the entire building, which gave us a lot of room to work with.

In the process of using point cloud as a design tool, we utilized and incorporated multiple different formats and ways of modeling, such as crafted mesh objects, 3D scans, AI-generated models, and so on. All of the models would then undergo a process where we simplified them into point-cloud data and populated the point-cloud scan of the mall. It resulted in something that we found very interesting and novel — a playground made of tiny dots that seemed to blend everything so well and blur the edges of objects to an extent that made everything read as a single unified landscape rather than distinguished formats, models, and styles. We imagine that in the future, perhaps a software package will exist that could use point cloud as its base model unit to make the interoperability of different formats much easier than current software packages do.