Everything starts
in the ditch.
The Ditch is HXTN's R&D lab. The birthplace, and the graveyard, of what could have been.
We prototype the braindump, leave it in the dark, and see what climbs out. Some become real work. Some stay at the ditch. We keep those where you can still see them.
Named after the ditch that ran through Shoreditch.
We just kept the habit.
As Shoreditch was our home before Hoxton.
Most studios bury their experiments. We don't.
A lab that only shows its wins is a portfolio. The ditch is where the braindump lives. We build the thing before anyone asks for it, leave it in the dark, and see what climbs out. Some of it becomes a brief. Some of it stays ours.
Current
obsessions.
R·01
Old tech, retrofitted
Our favourite, and something like a belief. We love taking old tech: rotary phones retrofitted to run an experience, old highway poles, cassette tapes mixed with RFID, tower viewers turned into VR, arcade machines. We retrofit them to our need, for ideas they were never intended for. New tech ages fast. Old tech, pointed somewhere new, gets to be astonishing twice. And half the magic in a room comes from hardware that has no business still working.
R·02
Hyper personalisation
Models that watch, listen, answer and interact at the speed of the room, so the experience responds to this moment instead of a pre-render of it. Live & Reactive.
R·03
Spatial point clouds
Spatial scanning, point clouds. We scan rooms, buildings, whole streets, and turn them into clouds of light you can walk through. The point cloud on our homepage climbed out of this one.
R·04
Body tracking
Yes, Kinects are still a thing. Depth cameras and skeleton tracking, so a room knows where you stand and what your hands are doing, without asking you to wear anything.
What we've
R&D'd.
A live demo on how physical and digital retail can launch as one.
A splat that erodes into nothing.
A 404 you break with your hands.
A timer for the five-second stop.
Not everything in the ditch is for a client. Some of it is ours to keep.
Both ideas are currently in prototype phase.
Goaty. A small goat who thinks he's the greatest.
Apetothemoon. A rocket fuelled with apes.
A live weather data sculpture. The outside, made visible inside.
What happens
down here.
Three things, mostly. Building fast, arguing honestly, and playing in the mud.
01Prove it or kill it
Prototype sprints
Short, timeboxed builds with one job: prove the idea or kill it. A week, sometimes a day. If it survives, it earns more time. If it doesn't, it stays in the ditch, and that's the cheapest failure there is.
02Before money is spent
Idea reviews
Is our plan just stupid, or is it brilliant? Every idea gets torn down by people who like it enough to be honest about it. Most don't survive the table. The ones that do are hard to argue with.
03No brief, no deadline
Playground
Every kid wants to play in a ditch. So do we. Unstructured time with tech on the table and hands on it. It looks like wasted time, right up until it isn't.