changing texture for a mesh on-the-fly in python

[shaiay]

I am trying to display a single mesh, but change the texture and uvs on the fly, say every 0.5 sec
I have a gui.SceneWidget which I use to display the mesh.
This is the code I tried to use for changing the texture

         o3d_mesh = o3d.geometry.TriangleMesh(
               o3d.utility.Vector3dVector(self.logic.meshes[mesh_name].vertices),
               o3d.utility.Vector3iVector(self.logic.meshes[mesh_name].faces)
           )
         if image is not None:
               uv = self.logic.get_texture_map_for_image(image_id=image['image_id'], mesh_name=mesh_name)
               o3d_mesh.triangle_uvs = o3d.utility.Vector2dVector(uv)
               o3d_mesh.textures = [image['image_data']]
           o3d_mesh.compute_vertex_normals()

          self._scene.scene.remove_geometry(mesh_name)
          self._scene.scene.add_geometry(mesh_name, o3d_mesh, self.settings.material)

image["data"] is of the type o3d.geometry.Image

This code is

1. very slow
2. does not really work -- I do not see a texture on the mesh ...

any help would be appreciated
open3d 0.13.0 with python 3.6 on windows 10