What is an interface world model?

The idea joins two things that used to be separate. An ordinary interface is a deterministic program: the same click always does the same thing. A world model is a generator of visual content that keeps simulating a scene as you act in it. Runway's framing is that an interface world model has to be both: predictable enough to use, and generated live like a world.

How Solaris works

• ✓A language model plans. It reads what you asked for, decides whether your action changes the current screen or moves to a new one, and writes the prompts that tell the renderer what to draw.
• ✓A real-time video model draws. Solaris is built on Gen-4.5, Runway's video generation model, adapted to respond to interaction. It follows Runway's earlier GWM-1 general world model.
• ✓Speed came in three steps. Runway converted the model to real time by generating frames one after another, distilling the denoising process into a few steps, and training the fast model on its own outputs.

The result has no implementation layer: the image is the application. Runway lists three properties it is aiming for: entirely visual, alive (the scene keeps evolving between your actions) and open-ended (the same screen can support behaviors nobody coded in advance).

What Runway measured

In a study with 250 participants, 30 interaction examples and nearly 7,500 pairwise judgments, people compared Solaris with a coded website that Claude Opus 5 built from the same image and requests:

Figures are from Runway's Solaris announcement. Runway ran the study on its own model and does not publish per-example scores.

Limits Runway names

• ✓Text. Stable, legible text is still very hard to generate in real time; Runway suggests a hybrid with conventionally rendered text.
• ✓Trust. A convincing wrong answer is worse than none, so Solaris stays anchored to the starting frame and reference material.
• ✓Long sessions. Keeping an interface coherent over a long session is still open research.
• ✓Accessibility. Generated screens need to work with screen readers and accessibility APIs, which pixels alone do not provide.
• ✓Speed budget. Runway notes interactions stop feeling interactive at around half a second of delay, which sets the bar every frame has to meet.

Availability

Solaris is not a public product. As of October 2026 Runway is working with partners and taking requests through an early-access form.

Interface world model vs related ideas

• ✓vs a world model: a world model like Genie 3 or Odyssey-3 simulates a place you move through. An interface world model simulates software you operate.
• ✓vs AI that writes code for a UI: a coding model produces a program that then runs. An interface world model skips the program and renders the result directly, which is why it can behave in ways nobody wrote down, and also why text and exact consistency are harder.
• ✓vs real-time video-to-video: tools like LiveGen transform a live camera feed as it plays. They share the same real-time generation principle, applied to your own video instead of an imagined screen. See real-time interactive video.

For every real-time video and world model release of 2026 in one table, see the release tracker.