Runway introduced Solaris on August 31, 2026, calling it the first model in a family it named Interface World Models. The New York research company says Solaris generates the interface itself, frame by frame, as a person clicks, drags, or types. There is no separate code layer underneath the pixels. The screen is the application.

The post argues that today’s software pays a translation tax. Designers make a picture, engineers turn that picture into HTML, and the live product is a thinner version of the original. Solaris is meant to skip that step. A single world model renders every frame and every response to input, so a clothing rack, a salad bowl, or a combustion demo can behave like a scene instead of a page.

Runway said it adapted its Gen-4.5 video model so the system understands interaction and stays fast enough to feel live. Frames are generated autoregressively. A language model decides how the scene should change. The company is targeting interactive speed at 720p and says the same work that made generation real time also cut the cost versus a standard video diffusion model.

A house study, and the gaps they listed

Runway compared Solaris with a coded interface driven by Claude Opus 5. In a study with 250 participants, 30 examples, and nearly 7,500 pairwise judgments, people preferred Solaris for following the requested interaction in 61 percent of comparisons, against 24 percent for the coded result. For natural behavior inside the scene, the split was 71 percent to 21 percent.

The company was more useful when it listed what still breaks. Stable, readable text is hard. A convincing wrong answer is worse than no answer in a store or a tutorial, so scenes have to be grounded in real product images and reference data. Long sessions drift. Generated interfaces also have to talk to screen readers and the rest of the software stack.

Solaris is not a public product. Runway said it is working with partners on a public launch and published an early-access form for name, work email, company, and company size.

Decoded Take

Solaris is a category pitch as much as a model: software that never gets compiled. The user study is in-house, and the hard problems Runway listed (text, trust, accessibility, session length) are exactly the reasons a generated storefront cannot replace a checkout flow tomorrow. The useful signal is a named partner that ships a public demo and keeps a scene coherent for more than a clip. If that demo is a brand room people can wander through, the Interface World Model label will stick. If it stays an early-access form, this is Gen-4.5 with a new envelope.