By Joel Johnson

What if one of the world’s most popular 3D engines, the same one used to power many of the most popular console games in the world, also ran in your web browser? That would be pretty interesting, right?

Things just got interesting: Epic Games has announced that their incredibly popular Unreal Engine 3 now works in Adobe Flash, demoing a version of Unreal Tournament 3running inside the new Adobe Flash Player 11.

That means porting existing games to work in a browser-based solution—and there are aton of games on Unreal Engine 3—would be more or less turnkey.

A quick look at the screenshots provided by Epic indicate that the engine isn’t as powerful as a non-browser-based engine—no big surprise there—but that it’s still very much a “real” 3D experience. (I haven’t yet seen the engine in motion.)

Even better, developers will be able to migrate their games from, say, iOS over to a browser-based environment without much hassle, making it possible to easily sell browser-based games that play the same games as apps on mobile devices.

But the real thing that should make you arch an eyebrow is Facebook. Nearly every game you can play on Facebook runs on Flash. And now Flash can run hardware-accelerated 3D, just like Real Games.