During the WWDC 07 show in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced id software’s John Carmack to the audience, watch the video-on-demand (VOD) in QuickTime and MPEG-4 by visiting via Apple.

At the 10:13 mark, the video shows the first look at the engine in the works at id Software, the intriguing visuals are accompanied by the following:

“So the last couple of years at id we’ve been working in secrecy on next-gen tech and a game for it… this is the first time we’re showing anything we’ve done on it publicly.” id Tech 5 … “What we’ve got here is the entire world with unique textures, 20GB of textures covering this track. They can go in and look at the world and, say, change the color of the mountaintop, or carve their name into the rock. They can change as much as they want on surfaces with no impact on the game.”

The id Software website has more:

In a surprise demonstration during Steve Job’s keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference today, John Carmack unveiled id’s latest revolution in game engine technology with the very first showing of id Tech 5 running live on the Mac with OS X.

The ground breaking technology unveiled today will power id’s new internally developed game and will be available for licensing to third parties. The new id rendering technology practically eliminates the texture memory constraints typically placed on artists and designers and allows for the unique customization of the entire game world at the pixel level, delivering virtually unlimited visual fidelity. Combined with a powerful new suite of tools designed to specifically facilitate and accelerate this content creation process, id Tech 5 will power games that contain vast outdoor landscapes that are completely unique to the horizon, yet have indoor environments with unprecedented artistic detail.

While shown for the very first time running in real time on a Mac, id Tech 5 additionally supports the Xbox 360 and Playstation3 console platforms as well as the PC, and will be available for licensing to developers and publishers interested in working with a truly next generation rendering and game development solution. id Software will be showing id Tech 5 to interested developers and publishers by appointment only at the E3 Media & Business Summit from July 11 — 13, 2007 in Santa Monica, Calif.

This new technology looks to be quite promising and will compete with Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, Valve’s Source game engine, and Crytek’s CryTECH 2 engine.

[press release]