For his work in non-rigid shape registration, human digitization, and real-time facial performance capture, Li received the TR35 Award in 2013 from the MIT Technology Review.

[3] Li joined Industrial Light & Magic / Lucasfilm in 2012 as a research lead to develop next generation real-time performance capture technologies for virtual production and visual effects.

In 2022, Li was appointed associate professor of computer vision at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi to direct a new AI center for Metaverse research.

In 2014, he was brought on as visiting professor at Weta Digital to build the high-fidelity facial performance capture pipeline for reenacting the deceased actor Paul Walker[17] in the movie Furious 7 (2015).

His recent research focuses on combining techniques in Deep Learning and Computer Graphics to facilitate the creation of 3D avatars and to enable true immersive face-to-face communication and telepresence in Virtual Reality.

In the same year, he founded the company Pinscreen, Inc.[20] in Los Angeles, which introduced a technology that can generate realistic 3D avatars of a person including the hair from a single photograph.

[21] They also work on deep neural networks that can infer photorealistic faces[22] and expressions,[23] which has been showcased at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2019 of the World Economic Forum in Dalian.

[24][25] In 2019, Hao and media forensics expert, Hany Farid, from the University of California, Berkeley, released a research paper outlining a new method for spotting deepfakes by analyzing facial expression and movement patterns of a specific person.

[29][30] For his work on visual effects, Hao has been credited in several motion pictures, including Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), Furious 7 (2015), The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), and Noah (2014).