Using Amazon Web Services S3 to Host 360° Virtual Reality Panoramas & 360° Video
Amazon Web Services S3 is an excellent solution for hosting 360° VR Panoramas, S3 is very inexpensive, easy to set up and manage, and allows easy embeds of your panoramas on other domains and websites using iframes, PanoPress, etc
AWS S3 has no inode limit and works especially well with multi-res panoramas, gigapixel panoramas, and large virtual tours with tens of thousands of image tiles, many standard shared hosting plans have an inode limit of 100,000 files per account, which can easily be exceeded with a few large gigapixel tours created with krpano, Panotour Pro, or Pano2VR, AWS S3 also works well for large streaming 360° Video Files
However, setting up bucket policies and CORS configuration to automatically set proper viewing permissions and HTML5 Virtual Realty functions requires a bit of code on the AWS bucket setting s page, see below for details
Exmaple Panorama
Here is an example 360° panorama hosted on Amazon S3, embedded here with an iframe
Create an AWS S3 Account
If you do not already have an AWS S3 account, sign up for a Free Amazon Web Services Trial Account, see the following video for details
Create a Bucket
Once you have created your account you will need to create at least one Bucket, see the following video for simple instructions if you are not already familiar with basics of using AWS S3
Set permissions for your bucket
use the AWS web interface to set AWS Bucket Policy & CORS Configuration, setting these as below will automatically set public read access permissions for all files in that bucket, otherwise you will have to set permission per file and may have trouble viewing your panoramas
AWS S3 Bucket Permissions: Bucket Policy and CORS Configuration
Go to your "All Buckets" list on your S3 page, click on the "Properties" button in the upper right, select your bucket, and click on the "Permissions" option, and set the following -
Edit Bucket Policy -
Replace MY_BUCKET_NAME with the name of the bucket you are editing
{ "Version": "2008-10-17", "Id": "http referer policy example", "Statement": [ { "Sid": "readonly policy", "Effect": "Allow", "Principal": "*", "Action": "s3:GetObject", "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::MY_BUCKET_NAME/*" } ] }
Add CORS Configuration
http://* https://* GET 3000 Authorization
Uploading Panoramas
You can upload your panoramas to AWS S3 either using the web interface, or with ftp clients such as Cyberduck or Transmit, and many others
More Info on Using AWS S3
See the Amazon S3 documentation or search Google for more information on using AWS S3 and other AWS web hosting services
Sam
Hi,
I’ve just added three tutorials to my Amazon S3 Tips & Tutorials .
They are;
Create an AWS Account
Configure Amazon S3 to Publish 360˚ Panoramas
Mask the Long S3 URL
Any feedback appreciated.
cheers,
Tony
just open the link to your hosted index.html file in a web browser to view the tour, url will be something like this, replace MY-PATH etc with correct values for your server
http://MY-BUCKET.s3.amazonaws.com/MY-PATH/index.html
Hi! Serious newbie here – I was able to get through all of these instructions, thanks so much for them! I’ve NEVER hosted anything online, and I’m trying to learn how to host my demo virtual tour – I created a tour with Marzipano, and it says to deploy I have to upload the contents of a file into a hosting service. I uploaded them to my bucket, now what would be the next step in order to view them and have others view the tour?
you would need to set up an AWS EC2 instance for unzipping to S3, S3 is only simple storage, no apache or php or unzip other server library goodies
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22961540/unzip-file-on-ec2-and-save-it-on-s3
also see this link
https://www.cloudzipinc.com
sam
Hi Sam,
Is there any way i can upload my panorama files as ZIP and unzip it directly to the S3 Bucket? Thanks
Hi everybody,
I need some help. I decide that I move my panotours to the Amazon S3 service from my webhosting provider.
I have tour on my own server: https://360pano.si/panorama/2017/10/Velikaplanina/resa.html
The same tour I copy to Amazon S3, https://resa.360pano.si
The problem is that on Amazon S3 I have trouble with panoramamenu text show (in the midle bottom of screen). It says undefined. On my own server its is ok. What can be here the fix fot that?
Is something whit the bucket policy?
This is what i set:
{
“Version”: “2012-10-17”,
“Statement”: [
{
“Sid”: “PublicReadGetObject”,
“Effect”: “Allow”,
“Principal”: ““,
“Action”: “s3:GetObject”,
“Resource”: “arn:aws:s3:::resa.360pano.si/”
}
]
}