  PanGEA, the Panoramic Graph Environment Annotation toolkit, is a lightweight
toolkit for collecting speech and text annotations in photo-realistic 3D
environments. PanGEA immerses annotators in a web-based simulation and allows
them to move around easily as they speak and/or listen. It includes database
and cloud storage integration, plus utilities for automatically aligning
recorded speech with manual transcriptions and the virtual pose of the
annotators. Out of the box, PanGEA supports two tasks -- collecting navigation
instructions and navigation instruction following -- and it could be easily
adapted for annotating walking tours, finding and labeling landmarks or
objects, and similar tasks. We share best practices learned from using PanGEA
in a 20,000 hour annotation effort to collect the Room-Across-Room dataset. We
hope that our open-source annotation toolkit and insights will both expedite
future data collection efforts and spur innovation on the kinds of grounded
language tasks such environments can support.
