The social game developer, Rocket Ninja, has been working furiously on raking in the investments for their newest venture: bringing 3D games to the highly social market of Facebook. Already they have pulled in $3.5 million in their first round. The new engine, which is described as “streaming 3D” will use a lightweight Flash component to manage itself so that users don’t need wait for a long download.

VentureBeat’s GamesBeat blog interviewed Oded Pelled, chief executive of Rocket Ninja, about the new engine and they’re current projects,

Pelled showed a working version of what images would like on the company’s new streaming 3D engine, code-named Shr3D. The engine is unique in that it allows high-quality 3D games to be rendered within the Adobe Flash environment on Facebook. That means Ocean Kingdom can have scenes with dozens of two-dimensional fish. And later 3D games will have detailed characters — with as many as 10,000 building blocks known as polygons. That level of quality is close to what you would find in a high-end console game.

Ocean Kingdom is one of Rocket Ninja’s current offerings for Facebook players—a virtual aquarium with thematic elements and virtual goods. While there’s a lot of controversy about whether or not bringing 3D to social gaming will work, the fashion in which the game developer intends to do it may tip the scales: they’re not looking to push FPS shooters and RTS onto social gamers, just upgrade their current experience.

The initial roll-out of streaming 3D gaming looks like it will upgrade current games to produce more depth to their game play. The example of the virtual fish tank above suggests that it would enable Rocket Ninja to create a much more immersive aquarium environment, giving more room for virtual goods—which people can buy, adding to the incentive to give larger spaces to be filled.

After reading through the article, the takeaway innovation from the Shr3D engine should be this: “Pelled said that his company can provide a next-generation experience within the confines of what Facebook users currently expect. The result will be rich, more complex games with cool graphics, Pelled said. The Shr3D engine requires Flash 10, but it does not require any extra features (known as hooks) to operate.”

People like shiny. They like it delivered quickly with less muss and fuss. Nobody has gone broke giving social gamers the next-glittering-thing to play with and customize along with a button for them to pour money into your coffers for the ability to personalize and one-up their friends with their own experience.