This paper reports some issues involved in the construction of an interactive, interoperable application, whose primary purpose is to be used as a virtual mockup. This graphic tool was tailored for machine vision application prototyping, to cope with metrological settings of large part assemblies. Some relevant aspects of designing interactive 3D applications will be discussed, including an account of some modern graphics libraries, particularly Java 3D. The achieved results, including some interesting byproducts of this work, to be publicly distributed soon, are also presented.