
Thanks to the efforts of Kurt Berglund, a new hire on the Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly "Avalon") team, there is now a library that allows standard WPF controls (like buttons, text boxes, lists) to be used interactively on 3D objects. This is not a native feature of the 1.0 version of the framework--such items could be displayed, but were non-interactive. See
this channel9 video or
this blog post for
details on how this (dare I say) clever hack works. Source code is also available.