Terranim – Another project from one of the OpenIllusionist.org.uk team. Terranim is a scripting tool written by Dan Parnham for the Terragen 3d terrain renderer, with some rather nifty splining functions to give very smooth animation.

LeafAnalyser – An application developed for the Biology department at the University of York. LeafAnalyser is capable of determining leaf margins from scanned images, building point models of the leaf shape and then performing statistical analyses on large quantities of shape data.

Enrico Costanza – More interesting work in augmented reality and tangible interfaces, Enrico worked on several forerunners to the Illusionist before moving to the Media Lab Europe.

The World of John Robinson – Sometime supervisor to everyone that helped start the Illusionist project, with a background in image coding and video augmented environments. A detailed list of his research – amongst other things – can be found here.

OpenGL – Open-source 3D graphics libraries. Used by the Illusionist for all rendering.

Notepad++ – A fantastic alternative to Notepad. It features tabbed documents, syntax highlighting and syntax folding, multiple development language support.

TortoiseSVN – Adds subversion functionality to the Windows explorer context menus. OpenIllusionist now uses the subversion service on sourceforge instead of CVS.

WinMerge – Used to merge two files, it automatically highlights the differences between the files and allows you to copy those differences from one to the other. It can process entire directories showing you which files are different and why.

wxWidgets – Cross-platform library for developing graphical user interfaces (it also contains many other useful widgets). OpenIllusionist v0.05 onwards is implemented using wxWidgets, thereby allowing it to be compiled on most major platforms.

Firefox & Thunderbird – Thunderbird is an excellent and secure mail client. Its latest neat feature is a rather handy search tool. Firefox is, frankly, the best web browser there is. If you haven’t already, get it. Now.

MIR.NET – Multiple Image Resizer (MIR.NET) is a tool for doing simple batch processing on lots of images. Sadly, you’ll need to get the .NET framework to use it.

Inkscape – An open-source vector graphics package.

Miranda – Instant messaging over every messenger network under the sun, and then some, in a lovely, unobtrusive interface with excellent privacy controls.

FileZilla – A free ftp client that also supports secure file transfers.

7-Zip – Compression/Decompression utility that can handle a variety of archive formats ranging from ZIP to TAR and also contains it’s own format (7z) which is reckoned to be 2-10% better than ZIP.

OpenOffice – An open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, available for all major platforms and capable of exporting and importing Office files such as doc, xls and ppt!

VirtualDub – A free video capture and processing utility that will allow you to compress/re-compress video, apply effects and even build animations out of a series of images.