Chad Wooten, Author at Geomedia

TxDOT Don’t mess with Texas® Case Study

TxDOT Don’t mess with Texas^® Case Study

The Challenge:

The Don’t mess with Texas(R), remains permanently ingrained in the state’s psyche and is recognized around the world. But maybe not as the Texas Department of Transportation had hoped. The phrase had taken on a life of its own as something beyond the original intent. The state wanted to refocus the energy around the brand to the original intent. Don’t mess with Texas means don’t litter. Geomedia was engaged to help gamify ananti-littering concept as TxDOT was cross-crossing the state with the educational message.

Objectives:

Create an experience that’s just as fun as it is memorable, while also incentivizing Texans to properly dispose of their trash and keep Texas highways clean.

Gamify the message of the campaign via a virtual reality (VR) experience, that could travel and be easy to execute.

Solutions:

Geomedia developed a VR game to virtually place users into an interactive, 360-degree scene of a picturesque Texas roadside. In the play area of the game, virtual garbage items, resembling some of the most common offenders of Texas litter, were scattered at the players’ feet and around the playfield. The game allowed players to use the VR headset and controllers to become immersed in this scene and pick up the trash. The objective was to gamify the importance of throwing trash into trash cans, opposed to tossing it out on the side of the road. Immersed in a beautiful landscape, modeled after a real Texas roadside in Fredericksburg,Texas, participants are challenged to earn points for each piece of trash they throw away and are encouraged to shoot for high score in the time allotted to each VR experience.

Results:

When the Don’t mess with Texas VR station debuted as an attraction at the PGA Valero Texas Open, the station was beloved by participants and guests. The attraction accomplished the goal of recentering the understanding of Don’t mess with Texas means don’t litter, while also being a memorable, fun, and innovative approach to extending the campaign’s reach.

Japanese Tea Gardens Case Study

Client & Background:

The San Antonio Parks Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and enhancing the parks in San Antonio and Bexar County. The famous Japanese Tea Gardens are among the parks they operate and maintain to preserve history. The San Antonio Parks Foundation was looking for a new and innovative method to inform and entertain the thousands of guests the garden sees each year.

The Challenge:

The Japanese Tea Gardens have over a century’s worth of history and a wealth of natural beauty to offer guests. The San Antonio Parks Foundation wanted to offer an experience that let people of all ages interact with the garden in a fun and educational way. They wanted to give people something to interact with as they walked about the tea gardens. The solution needed to be fun and something guests could get invested in, without distracting them from the garden itself. For this reason, traditional methods of environmental education, like signage and brochures, would not work.

Objectives:

Develop a solution that informs, educates, and entertains guests of the garden.

Ensure the solution is low profile and doesn’t distract people from the garden.

Solutions:

The San Antonio Parks Foundation partnered with Geomedia to create the Japanese Tea Garden Augmented Reality (AR) app, an application designed for smartphones and tablets that would allow users to interact with the garden in a unique way. Using the camera on a phone, users could walk around the gardens and use AR to see hidden pictures and sights through the lens of their device. The app also includes interactive timelines and history that supplement the gardens with a wealth of background knowledge that can be easily accessed by any guest.

The app contained content for all ages including a chance to digitally color a koi fish, a map with specific points of interest for the guest to explore and interact with and collect badges as they visited, a series of historical themed puzzles to solve, and even take pictures of an AR simulated dragon.

Results:

The app brought the visitor experience of the Japanese Tea Gardens to another level. The immersive experience was educational in how it demonstrated the history and chronological ecology of the gardens, but also entertaining with how it presented fun minigames and ways to interact with the garden. All of this without blocking the line of sight with traditional signage and keeping the beauty of the gardens intact.

Indy Case Study

Client & Background:

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum (IMS Museum), located inside the legendary Indy Racetrack in Indiana, welcomes more than 140,000 visitors a year. The museum has over 150 vehicles and more than 55,000 different artifacts but has not been updated in decades. A more modern facelift allowed the museum to leverage technology to give race fans hands-on experiences and restore a beloved attraction worthy of the Racing Capital of the World. Geomedia was asked to join the teams at Balance Studios and BPI to help capture content for the new museum and create interactive experiences to help fans feel like they were part of an Indy Pit Crew.

The Challenge:

This project was the perfect opportunity for Geomedia to showcase their planning, execution skills, and safety experience, in addition to delivering on exceptional production expertise. The Indy 500 is seen as a sacred event. Drivers are celebrities and their teams have garages that are off-limits to most. More than 350,000 race fans come to watch cars that can reach speeds of over 230 mph as they fly around the track 500 times trying to win the coveted race.

You can only hope the weather for an event like this is perfect (spoiler, it wasn’t) as rain adds an extra layer of complexity. Forget the fact that you have a full production crew spread out around the track, cars flying past at 200 mph, and your team glued to eyepieces—unaware of everything else happening around them.

For 500 laps and three hours of filming, the Geomedia team would need to choreograph positions, down the the second, to fulfill an ambitious shotlist – with no second takes.

Objectives:

To bring the race to life, a splinter unit delved behind the scenes—interviewing drivers and their teams preparation to reveal the passion, pressure, and preparation fueling every lap

Meanwhile, there was a massive coordinated effort with multiple videographers and photographers across the track to capture the actual Indy 500 race to ensure the team had the content needed to create the interactive displays.

Work began as the race ended as Geomedia leveraged the hours of 4K and 8K footage with post production support that ultimately resolved in highlight videos, 3D animated CGI interactives, and overall storytelling around the race.

Our 3D imagery and interactive development paved the way for visitors to fully engage in all the museum has to offer – creating memories and experiences that would have them return year after year.

Solutions:

Months of planning for every scenario paid off. Geomedia earned the trust of drivers who shared their stories and gave access to their garages in an unprecedented way. More than 12 Sony Burano, FX6 and A7Siii cameras plus a drone were assigned (and safely) positioned around the track on race day. An organized team made the best of resetting after a massive thunderstorm rolled through the area delaying the race.

The shoot was a massive success and next was the months of cataloguing footage and images, rendering animation to create immersive attractions.

“Starting Line Experience”, an exhibit that has guests enter a room decorated to look like it’s right in the middle of the speedway. Guests can take a seat beside real racecars that are all lined up and watch a video simulating the commencement of the Indy 500 race.

“In the Race” features a racing simulator that lets guests experience the thrill and the high-octane action of racing in the Indy 500.

“Pit-Stop Challenge” lets guests simulate the experience of working on a Pit Crew and servicing a vehicle as fast as they can so they can get their car back on the track to continue to race.

Results:

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum opened to great fanfare in April of 2025 and has broken all first-year attendance records with fans young and old commenting about the new experiences that bring them closer to their beloved sport.

“Beauty” by H-E-B Case Study

Client & Background:

For over a hundred years, H-E-B has been serving Texans and is deeply cemented into the state’s identity. The store is always trying to delight and surprise customers with products, services, experiences, and competitive pricing. While you might not think about beauty products in a grocery store, one of the retailer’s slogans- “No store does more…” is taken seriously.

The Challenge:

H-E-B wanted to create a “store within a store” for their Beauty Department. Called Beauty by H-E-B, this specialized section offered customers an expanded selection which included department stores and specialty brands not carried by an average grocery store. Led by a trained team of Beauty Advisors, the customer could get expert advice and top-of-the-line customer service. However, if the experience was going to feel like a specialty retailer, it needed to look the part with a unique look, tone, and feel.

Geomedia was tasked to design, produce and direct luxurious visuals that elevated the department’s atmosphere, with stylized, high-end beauty imagery showcased across a multitude of digital monitors.

Objectives:

Develop a turnkey production featuring a diverse cast of 30 models with 3-4 makeup looks each, supported with on-trend fashion—designed to generate excitement and draw customers into the space.

With limited time and budget, develop a cohesive, multi-stream content showcase that can loop in-store and be easily refreshed with new seasonal themes and product lines—engaging customers with a relatable tone that enhances the department experience.

Solutions:

Geomedia directed a crew of key make-up artists and wardrobe specialists, cast models and the production team started mapping out the shot list that would help H-E-B meet the goal and draw attention to the department. Visual product demonstrations– a model kissing glass and leaving a perfect lipstick mark, explosions of colorful powder representing the variety of shades available– were some of the exciting visuals showcased. Whether close-up shots of applicators and a palette of over 70 tubes of lipstick all painting a colorful array, there was a stunning variety of looks captured across the entire set.

Once the shoot wrapped, Geomedia’s role shifted to crafting high-energy, professional visual content tailored for each marquee. Designed to captivate shoppers, the edit, music selection, and striking visuals worked together to spark excitement—giving customers a reason to stop, engage, and buy.

Results:

The reimagined department delighted customers with cutting-edge, on-trend visuals and the surprise element of the store’s unique design. Two banner monitors showcased the primary video created by Geomedia, while supplemental screens supported the overall aesthetic with high-end visual effects, CGI, and motion graphics—ultimately delivering the immersive experience H-E-B aimed to create.