This is not possible to do as you mentioned.
NME only controls the way things are rendered so basically the color of the pixels on screen but it does not impact any other element rendered in the same scene. It is only a material of a mesh.
What you want is changing the mesh position/transforms themselves.
In general to achieve this I would advise to create your own “configurator” BabylonJS and WebGL 3D configurators to control the experience end to end.