I am a part of research team that researches some aspects of human body movements. I have to choose the proper technology for creating an interactive human avatar which will test/illustrate some research points. The resulting program should run on many platforms: iPhone/iPad, Android phones, PC, Mac and XBox (interacting with Kinect).
The most close existing 3D technology that I found is Unity , but having no experience with it I am afraid it is a significant overhead for creating a simple interactive human avatar that can take different poses (no faces, no textures, pure geometry).
My second thought was Java3d, but it seems abandoned by Oracle.
Which other options should I check?
I know that similar questions were asked on SO, but things are changing, new technologies arise almost daily and 2 years old answer can be absolutely irrelevant.
When it comes to modelling, Unity3D isn't the best choice. You don't have much to work with... just a few primitive 3D shapes (cubes, spheres and a few more) which you can "combine" in order to obtain something more complex. But it's very unlikely that you will get what you want. My recommendation is the following: