INSTRUCTIONS: If you are on a computer with good graphics, select HIGH QUALITY for the splat quality. You can rotate the point cloud with your mouse. To pan the scene, right-click on your mouse, which will reorient you.
LOCATION: Cocoa Beach, Florida
DATE: Current
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
Typically, we laser scan a single building for our projects, capturing the larger ‘life history’ of the building by conducting extensive research on the evolution of the structure and its connection to the larger community. We thought, what if we expanded the concept and captured a significant portion of a thoroughfare? With MemoryScan, we laser-scanned a 10km section of State Road A1A in the City of Cocoa Beach and its intersection with State Road 520. While this area is the commercial heart of Cocoa Beach today, it represented the city’s connection to the space and missile industry in the 1950s and 1960s. Along these two avenues stood buildings directly associated with Cape Canaveral contractors such as Boeing and Pan American, but more importantly, it is here where you would find buildings with Space-Age names like the Satellite and Vanguard Motels or the Apollo Building. Today, many of these structures no longer exist or have undergone significant modification. This project seeks to capture a 3D representation of the avenues today and incorporate depictions from this earlier era – it is our Cocoa Beach Glass Bank project on a much larger scale.
Initially, Langan Engineering used their Leica Pegasus Two Mobile Sensor Platform to capture this 10 km portion of Cocoa Beach along State Road A1A and State Road 520. In November 2023, Langan acquired a Leica Pegasus TRK 700 Neo, providing an even sharper capture of A1A than the earlier Pegasus 2 unit. While the unit was capturing the scan while driving the speed limit in Cocoa Beach, it can capture in excess of 55 mph.
As the City of Cocoa Beach has undergone significant change since the 1960s, the project has developed a series of “Memory Markers” in Maya to assist participants in mentally locating structures and significant objects that are no longer in Cocoa Beach today. Many of these are based on the Space-Age themed businesses that lined A1A during the period. In addition to the Memory Markers, several “Touchstone” structures, such as the Cocoa Beach Glass Bank, were also developed in Maya to be added to the larger Unreal experience.
Papers and Conference Presentations to Date:
MemoryScan Environments: Creating Large-Scale Memory-Evocative Digital Twins
Lori C. Walters, Robert Michlowitz, Esteban Segarra Martinez, Ryan McMahan, Joseph T. Kider Jr.
IEEE Digital Twins and Parallel Intelligence (DTPI) Conference, 2023
MemoryScan: Smart Digital Transformation of Large-scale Environments for Eliciting Location-Specific Knowledge
Robert Michlowitz, Joseph T. Kider Jr. Lori C. Walters
Workshop on Photorealistic Image and Environment Synthesis for Mixed Reality IEEE-ISMAR (PIES-MR), 2022
Articles About MemoryScan:
https://www.ucf.edu/news/the-way-we-remember/
https://news.cah.ucf.edu/news/ucf-professors-recreate-communities-of-the-past-with-virtual-reality/
https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/the-new-era-of-simulation/
Acknowledgements:
ER: Exploratory Research Award from UCF to conduct initial work on the MemoryScan project.
The project was awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 2022.
ChronoPoints would like to thank Langan Engineering for their support of this effort.
MemoryScan is dedicated to the late Vivian Lindauer.