Preview of World Building Week

A week on the digital and physical worlds we're choosing to build (June 15–21).

We are accepting applications to Edge Esmeralda on a rolling basis. Apply here to join us in Healdsburg, CA ☀️

---

TLDR

• World Building is the third week of Edge Esmeralda (June 15–21), on the digital and physical worlds people are building with the new generation of tools.

• The week brings together artists, designers, engineers, world model builders, roboticists, and creative technologists.

• Programming spans talks, hands-on labs, demos, and a maker’s space with image-to-3D and text-to-3D tools wired directly into live 3D printers.

• If you are interested in virtual environments, generative tools, fabricated objects, or robots, this is your week.

---

Three years ago, building a 3D model took a sculptor and a week. Simulating a character took a studio. A useful robot arm cost more than a car. A virtual world took a team.

Now most of this can happen in a weekend, on a laptop, by one person.

The interesting question is what we build with all of that. What kinds of worlds, digital and physical, we want to live in, and who gets to make them.

That is the question behind the third week of Edge Esmeralda 2026: World Building, a weeklong program for the people designing the worlds the next decade will live in.

What the week covers

From June 15 to 21, Justin Melillo is hosting in Healdsburg. The week is organized around a simple thesis: the tools to build worlds, virtual and physical, have become cheap, fast, and accessible. What we choose to do with them is the open question.

Three threads run through it.

Digital worlds. AI-generated environments, virtual worlds, immersive media, and the shared spaces people will increasingly inhabit. A live shared world will run all week; participants can send in their own avatars and OpenClaw agents, and builders can layer on top with games, tools, and new experiences. We’ll also cover XR, smart glasses, and the interfaces through which we’ll access these spaces.

From pixels to atoms. A maker’s lab open all week with 3D printers, fabrication tools, and AI-assisted design workflows. MONA’s image-to-3D and text-to-3D will run live into the printers. You can prompt a sculpture in the morning, hold it before lunch, and revise it in the afternoon. The same loop applies to furniture, parts, tools, prototypes, and pieces of larger installations.

Embodied intelligence. Robotics is becoming a world-building discipline. Humanoids, low-cost robot arms, open-source robotics stacks, and embodied AI models are putting capable hardware in the hands of small teams. The week will cover what happens when models trained in simulation start running on real bodies, and what that means for the next decade of physical building.

Around twenty sessions confirmed across the week, with more being added.

Why now

A few things are converging.

Generative video and 3D have crossed a threshold most people haven’t fully registered. Models like Genie, Sora, and Veo turn a sentence into a usable scene. Tripo, Meshy, and similar tools turn an image into a printable mesh. World Labs and a handful of others are training foundation models for entire 3D worlds.

Robotics is following the same curve a few years behind. Unitree, Figure, and a wave of open-source projects are putting capable hardware in the hands of small teams. Models trained in simulation are starting to run on real bodies.

And the loop between digital and physical is closing. The same models that generate a virtual environment can train a robot to move through it. The same image-to-3D tools that build a sculpture on screen drop the file straight into a printer. What used to be separate pipelines for graphics, simulation, fabrication, and embodiment are starting to look like a single workflow.

A weekend now gets you a working version of something that would have taken a studio a year.

We want the people doing this work in the same room for a week.

What the week looks like

Mornings stay open for focused work and writing sessions at cafés around Healdsburg. Daytimes alternate between the maker’s lab, build sessions, and quiet work. Afternoons are talks, panels, and live demos. Evenings are dinners, salons, and a developer night where builders show what they’re making.

Who this is for

• Artists and creative technologists working with AI, simulation, fabrication, or new interfaces.

• Engineers and vibe coders building worlds, tools, and games.

• AI researchers and world model builders working on environments and embodied intelligence.

• XR, AR, and VR builders making immersive experiences and spatial tools.

• Roboticists w orking on humanoids, robot arms, and open-source stacks.

• Designers and makers working at the seam between digital and physical.

• Folks interested in these topics

How to join

World Building Week is open to confirmed Edge Esmeralda 2026 ticket holders. If you have a ticket, you’re in.

If you don’t, applications are still open at edgeesmeralda.com.

Questions, speaker pitches, or partnership interest: katherine@edgecity.live

We’ll see you in Healdsburg.

The Edge City Team ☀️