Robot visualisation

[motters]

At the moment I have a 2D overhead visualisation of the robot, but
since this project is fundamentally about 3D it would also be nice to
have a 3D visualisation. The obvious thing to do here would just be
to use DirectX or an existing application such as the Microsoft
robotics studio. However, my plan at present is that the project
should be able to be run under Mono on a Linux operating system, so I
want to avoid anything which might heavily tie me to a Microsoft
platform. Although there is some DirectShow stuff within Sentience at
present I've kept this well away from the core algorithms, such that
the relevant parts could be rewritten using V4L.

Does anyone know of any simple 3D engines written in C#, which would
be compatible with a GPL licence? Having done a brief search for 3D
engines it seems that most of them are not written in C#, meaning that
clumsy DLL calls would need to be made (which I want to avoid at all
costs), or come with a lot of commercial baggage which would make them
non-free to distribute. It doesn't matter if the rendering is slow
and done in software only, since this would be purely used as an easy
way to visualise the physical design of the robot.

3D visualisation of the robot is only a very low priority task, a
nicety rather than a necessity, so it doesn't really matter if I have
to stick with simple visualisations for the foreseeable future.

[sentience-group]

I think opengl would be the best choice. It is fully supported
everywere, should be quite easy to use and understand, maybe through
an interface midlevel library, or you code that lib by yourself,
simplifying opengl utilization.