Solaris is Runway's first Interface World Model, announced August 31, 2026. It renders a user interface directly, frame by frame, instead of running an app built from code. Clicks, drags and typed input are fed to the model as conditioning for the next frame, so every screen is synthesized in real time while you interact with it. There is no intermediate representation: no HTML, no component tree, no predefined screens or templates. Announcement
The pitch rests on a claim about translation. Runway argues that converting a design into code is a lossy step that freezes behavior ahead of time and sacrifices visual fidelity, and backs it with two vendor-run evaluations. First, a reconstruction benchmark across 30 interfaces found that multimodal models including GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude Fable 5 all lose measurable information (SSIM and DINOv3 similarity) when rebuilding an interface from a screenshot, with degradation growing as visual complexity rises. Second, a user study with 250 participants and roughly 7,500 pairwise judgments compared Solaris against a coded interface built by Claude Opus 5 for the same interactions: participants preferred Solaris 61 to 24 percent on following the requested interaction and 71 to 21 percent on behaving naturally within the scene.
Under the hood it builds on Runway's Gen-4.5 video model and the GWM-1 general world model. User input is treated like text or image conditioning. Real-time behavior comes from a three-stage conversion: autoregressive frame generation, distilling many denoising steps into a few, then training the fast model on its own outputs to hold quality over long sessions. A separate language model does the reasoning, deciding how the scene should evolve and producing prompts that guide the world model as it renders. Gen-4.5 GWM-1
Runway is candid about limits: stable legible text remains hard, grounding in verified product data is limited to the starting frame for now, coherence degrades over long sessions, and accessibility (screen readers, accessibility APIs) is unsolved. Visual quality targets 720p. Access is not open; Runway is collecting early-access requests and working with launch partners. Agent computer-use benchmark cited