3D instruction

Professor Illah Nourbakhsh is an excellent lecturer here at RI. He also pioneers many projects in robotics education. Doing my Robotic Manipulation homework, I couldn't help but to wonder how 3D visualization would aid the instruction of kinematics & dynamics, and what he thinks about it.

I'm certain that this would affect thousands of would-be mechanical engineers, and not just roboticists. Maybe some sort of combination of CAD and PowerPoint. It would have to be easy enough to manipulate on the fly, and designed well enough so that intuitive motions, perhaps even a gestural interface, would produce the desired results.

Note that this needn't be true 3D, simply a way to manipulate a 2D image which makes the represented 3D structure apparent.