The MemoryScan Project was designed to utilize 1960s “MemoryMarkers” of Cocoa Beach within the laser-scanned environment of the city from 2024/25. As the community has changed significantly since its space heyday of the 1960s, individuals who had not returned to Cocoa Beach since their departure in the 1960s/1970s would have difficulty recognizing landmarks in the tourist-centric city of today. Space-themed motel signs, such as the Satellite, Starlite, or Polaris, have given way to more corporate motels/hotels. The South Pacific was a popular theme throughout 1950s/1960s restaurants/motels in the United States, and Cocoa Beach was no exception, with the KoKo Motel and Samoa Lounge. We even have a recreation of Pinkie the Elephant that stood out front of Lee Caron’s Carnival Club. The gallery below provides a sampling of the MemoryMarkers developed for the project. To create each MemoryMarker, project artists used era photographs and ephemera as reference materials. Each were made in Maya and then imported into the Point Cloud environment within the Unreal Engine.

We also developed a series of Camera MemoryMarkers for participants to spark memories when we did not have sufficient images to develop a sign accurately, The camera selected was the Ansco Autoset 35mm. Why this particular camera, you may ask? Before his 1962 orbital mission, Mercury astronaut John Glenn visited a drugstore in Cocoa Beach and purchased this Ansco camera. It was subsequently modified to enable him to operate it effectively in space. When traveling along A1A, a series of these Camera Memory Markers are available for participants to explore.

See several MemoryMarkers below, each accompanied by a reference photo.

Do you have images of Cocoa Beach? Please consider sharing them with ChronoPoints. If you already have digital format images, send them to our email address – if they have not been digitized, we would be happy to digitize them for you.