This approach is using the bounding box size and longest dimension to choose a camera distance and angle. It works better than static pose and it's computationally cheap.

However, it can oversimplify for objects which are significantly asymmetrical. A good place to go from here is statistical measures of object recognizability:

Betke & Makris, Information-Conserving Object Recognition.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.44.4...

For 3D models, you can use hierarchical space carving to simplify the mesh first. You don't need great resolution, you just need better resolution than a rectangular bounding box.

(Note: PCA can be used for recognizability, but is not ideal. Highish complexity & overly general.)