3D graphics have been possible in Flash for a good few years now thanks to add-on libraries such as Papervision3D but the performance and visual quality of these solutions hasn't generally been up to much.

The next version of Flash Player, codenamed Molehill and due for release in 'the first half of 2011', looks like it's going to provide a massive step up in 3D performance for Flash sites. The main reason for this is that Adobe are finally including a hardware accelerated API in Actionscript that provides direct access to the 3D capabilities of the graphics card in the host computer.

Here's an example of 'Molehill' in action:

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