I see, thanks for the answer!
So if you stick with your schedule this huge feature should arrive in late September, right.
That'll be awesome

Thanks for letting me know.

The function that you need, […] will be in the next of the engine release

That sounds like this is in the next few weeks/months. Is that feasible?
So I am stuck with parenting everything together, then… or is there something I did not take into account then?

So, what result did the meeting have, when will this be on your todo list?
Right now I am converting every detail into several meshes.
What do I have to be careful about at this? Can I use constraints?

But this leads me to a whole new working package. I happen to have one single object with dozens of vertex groups which are connected at the places where they need to be connected according to our CAD model.
I've attached an armature and everything works just fine with rendering the table. Now my aim is to use the same data, without only minimal work on it (e.g. new material colors, because I previously used Cycles materials) to get a nice web visualisation.

You say, this needs way more work to get it done, then?

If I think of characters instead of CAD objects, it's not possible to do this with several objects, right? You have to use armature animation to interactively move the arm around, for example.

Thanks for all the hints. I got further with them.
At first I implemented the suggestion by Evgeny with a bone constraint "track-to" towards a key object, which doesn't do the trick. (At least not in the browser, in blender it works)
Now, when I parent the bone in Edit mode to the key object it simply hops onto it. I need to play around with the options I guess.
Is this the right way to go?…sorry, I am a little confused right now.

Thanks for the answer Yuri,
according to the answer I got from NASA they unfortunately won't support in any way, neither by supplying all source files nor by answering any questions regarding the implementation.

We have procedural bones transformation in our TODO list, so this kind of tasks should become more intuitive in future.

Actually Evgeny wrote this initially, This proofes wrong then?

Thanks for the example. This solves how to procedurally animate the object.
What is still missing is how can I interactively grab and move objects, like in the curiosity rover demo?

Thanks for the link, Yuri.
So I've written them a mail, we will see what happens
Actually, a little off topic, could you quickly have a look at the thread opened by me, there is an answer missing, I am waiting for… Thanks so much!

Would it be possible to get access to the sources of the curiosity project?
For the application that I am about to do this would be a really good starting point. The features are almost the same compared to what I want to do.

OK, just a short update. I've accomplished adding the empty that the bone is constrained to. It works.
The second step is, to interactively move the empty (I've also constrained the empty to a cube for this reason) interactively, and furthermore by API calls.