Confessions of a researchaholic

2026-09-30

Runway hackathon

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 8:15 pm
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For the first time in my life, I participated in a hackathon, hosted by Runway, whose products I have long admired. I especially like their motion brush feature, though it seems to have disappeared after Gen-2.

For this hackathon, I wanted to revive the motion brush as a direct manipulation tool that could complement other input modalities such as text prompts, keyframe images, and guide videos. See this repository for more information, including code, process, and demo videos.

Overall, I found this to be a very satisfying experience: an intense 6-hour event in which I could fully focus on ideation, design, implementation, experimentation, and demo production. Initially, I thought I would be the only participant over the age of 20, but the demographic turned out to be more diverse than I expected. I also got to see some very interesting demos from other participants.



https://www.behance.net/gallery/256531401/RunwayHackathon

2026-09-20

Hand-building

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 6:32 pm
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Hand-building seems more forgiving than throwing, as we can add and remove pieces of clay to the model gradually.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddh_Jg8G0Zu/
https://www.behance.net/gallery/256288399/Handbuilding

2026-09-13

Kusama: Infinity

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 9:29 pm
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I watched this documentary on hoopla about Yayoi Kusama’s life and art. It chronicles her difficult childhood, struggles with mental illness, and her resilient journey from decades of isolation and obscurity to eventual acclaim and influence on the art world.
The documentary is visually compelling and deeply inspiring. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in art, psychology, and the power of perseverance.

2026-09-02

Interface world model

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 9:03 am
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From TLDR newsletter about Runway’s Solaris:

Solaris is an Interface World Model. It can generate real-time interactive interfaces frame by frame as users interact with it. Solaris handles rendering and interactions jointly, generating every frame and every response to user input, eliminating the need for an intermediate representation. The model opens up new ways of building websites, apps, and other online interfaces. It can also be used to train agents in much more dynamic environments.

Very cool demos!
The basic idea is to use a MLLM to generate prompts from user inputs across multiple modalities (including texts, direct manipulation, etc.) and the current image frame content, and use the prompts to generate the next frame via a fast video diffusion model.
The article heavily emphasizes the contrast with approaches that generate an intermediate representation (like code) which can be too lossy for more complex images (like natural photographs rather than simple layouts).

Because the “interface” can be generated entirely on the fly at the OS level, it can replace the traditional app-based approach and allow for more dynamic and personalized interfaces that orchestrate underlying modules/tools to meet the user’s needs and preferences in real-time.
How to connect this interface world model with real computation substrate can be an interesting next step (e.g., via an agentic orchestration layer that can translate the interface world model into actual computation and data retrieval).

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