Opticks is a free and open source remote sensing application and development framework. Opticks is similar to commercial tools like ENVI, ERDAS Imagine, SOCET GXP, and RemoteView. Opticks can be used to load remote sensing data, usually imagery, and then perform analysis on that data to come to some conclusion. For example, Opticks can be used to work with hyper-spectral, multi-spectral, synthetic aperture radar, and motion imagery data. Opticks is also a development framework with a rich API and plug-in architecture that allows developers to use C++ to build new remote sensing algorithms and to create new remote sensing products. The majority of Opticks is actually implemented using it's own API and plug-in architecture.