The Three.ws User Group's First In-World Meetup: How It Went

By nich, three.ws

Yesterday I hosted the first meetup of the Three.ws User Group on IBM Community, and it ran nine hours, 8 AM to 5 PM Pacific, entirely inside three.ws itself. Not a webinar link, not a call with a slide deck: an actual persistent 3D world, open the whole day, in the $THREE home town at three.ws/play. The world was not gated to group members: anyone with the link could walk in, and the open room peaked at 3,145 concurrent avatars at once over the day. Jessica, the group's organizer on IBM's side, wrote her own account of the day on the group itself. This is mine.

Why we did it this way

Three.ws is the only project I know of with its own dedicated group on IBM Community, and it exists because our timelines crossed in public before the group did: IBM's own account traded posts with us on X that went a little viral (here and here), enough that people inside IBM who have nothing to do with this partnership know us by name. Once that group existed, describing the product to it on a call felt like the wrong move. Neither IBM nor three.ws is the slow, boring-enterprise thing people assume from the outside, and a meetup held entirely inside the thing we actually built was the honest way to prove it.

What the day looked like

The formal program ran the way it was scheduled: a live tour of the platform from inside the world, community demos from people who brought what they had built, and open Q&A about the two IBM-native pieces of the stack, @three-ws/ibm-watsonx-mcp (watsonx.ai on your own IBM Cloud account) and @three-ws/ibm-x402-mcp (pay-per-use IBM Granite billed in USDC, no IBM account required).

Around that, most of the day just looked like people spending time somewhere together. I spent a big chunk of it fishing, cooking what we caught, and driving the cars around the map with Broke Boi and BigB, no pitch deck in sight. None of that was scripted content: it's the same in-game economy and building layer every /play world runs on, vendor NPCs, banking, quests, vehicles, persistent collaborative building, used for nine straight hours by people who technically showed up for a corporate user group meetup and stayed because the venue turned out to be a real place. Watching an IBM Community organizer spend her afternoon fishing in our product instead of sitting through a deck is the whole pitch, working exactly as intended.

The rest of the platform, for people who only knew us from the MCP servers

The two IBM-native connectors were the official agenda item, but the Q&A wandered into the rest of the platform, and I want that on the record too. Forge is our free text-to-3D tool: type a sentence, get a textured model, no account required. Avatar Studio sits on top of it and does the harder part, it doesn't just generate a mesh, it rigs it, so whatever comes out can walk, wave, and sit down alongside everyone else in the room. That works on avatars from outside our own tool too: the retargeting layer reads whatever bone-naming convention a GLB arrives with, Mixamo, Avaturn, Unreal, VRM and VRM 1.0, Daz/Genesis, MakeHuman, Blender's own convention, and maps it onto one canonical skeleton, so a model made somewhere else entirely still animates correctly the moment it loads, no curated allowlist required. There's a wardrobe and cosmetics layer shared across every coin's world rather than scoped to one, and the agent-3d web component, which is how a site that isn't three.ws at all can embed one of these avatars and drive its animation state from its own code.

What it proved, beyond the vibe

Underneath the fun, a nine-hour meetup inside a live multiplayer world is a genuine stress test, run in front of an audience that would notice if it didn't hold up: an authoritative Colyseus server on Cloud Run, 15 Hz binary delta sync, and proximity-gated spatial voice, carrying real conversations for the length of a full workday. Concurrent users climbed past a thousand early and kept climbing, peaking at 3,145 at once, well past what a normal call or webinar link could even seat. It held. That's the part that matters for anyone deciding whether "meet inside the product" is a gimmick or a format worth repeating.

None of the event dressing was hand-built for the day. The countdown that turned into fireworks at 8 AM was worked out from a shared clock rather than pushed over the network, so the show held together no matter how many people were watching or how good anyone's connection was. Everyone who walked in while it was live got a Meetup Laurel, a small gold circlet, permanently, for free, granted server-side, and it will never be handed out again once the window closes: the only way to have one is to have actually been there. An event-only jobs board ran alongside it, four repeatable tasks paying better than the everyday board and feeding a live leaderboard, which is what Broke Boi, BigB, and I were actually racing each other on between fishing trips. It's the same event infrastructure every /play world gets when its coin runs a scheduled event; yesterday was the first time it ran at this scale in front of people who would notice if it didn't.

Where this partnership goes next

One meetup proves a format works, it isn't the whole plan. Jessica and I are already talking about making this a rhythm instead of a one-off: more joint blog posts on both sides instead of one recap each, and more of what we actually ship getting a shoutout through IBM's own channels instead of staying inside ours. There's a bigger swing we're looking at seriously too. IBM opened its Partner Plus marketplace motions to business partners this month, Microsoft Multiparty Private Offers across 35 countries and Google Cloud Marketplace Channel Private Offers across 43, on top of AWS reseller transactions that are already integrated with automatic rebates. We're now pursuing what it would take for three.ws to be eligible and approved to sell through those hyperscaler marketplaces alongside IBM software. Nothing here is confirmed, that approval is IBM's to grant, not ours to claim, but it's a real conversation that grew directly out of yesterday, and we'll post an update the moment there's something concrete to report.

The other side of this recap

Jessica's own account of the day, written live during the event and again once it wrapped, is the honest, personal half of this story, and this post isn't a substitute for it. Read it on the group's recent blogs page.

What's next

The world stays open. Anyone can walk into the $THREE home town at three.ws/play today, no download, no account, no wallet required to look around. The group stays open too, at the Three.ws User Group on IBM Community, and event infrastructure for /play, scheduled community events surfaced in the world lobby, richer creator controls, is next on our roadmap specifically because of how this one went.

I'm nich, building three.ws. Three.ws is an independent IBM Business Partner, and the Three.ws User Group on IBM Community is a community space three.ws moderates on IBM's platform, not an IBM product. IBM, watsonx, watsonx.ai, IBM Cloud, and Granite are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.

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