A .WRZ file is most often a gzip-compressed VRML world, meaning it’s just a .WRL 3D scene packed to reduce size, since VRML is a text-based format describing full 3D environments—geometry, materials, textures, lights, and sometimes animation—so compressing it works extremely well, and systems label this compressed form as .WRZ or sometimes `.wrl.gz`, with the typical workflow being to unzip it using tools like 7-Zip or `gzip` to get a .WRL file that VRML-capable viewers can load, keeping texture files in their expected folders so they appear correctly.A reliable sanity check is looking for the gzip marker 1F 8B, which strongly hints the file is a compressed stream consistent with WRZ, and one common mix-up involves RWZ, a format tied to email filtering configuration, so email-origin files are likely RWZ, while assets from 3D or web-3D workflows are usually proper WRZ files.
When people say a .WRZ is a "Compressed VRML World," they mean it’s a VRML scene file—normally a .WRL, where "WRL" literally means *world*—that’s been packed with gzip to shrink its size for storage or older web delivery, since VRML is a text-based 3D scene format capable of describing full environments with geometry, materials, textures, lights, viewpoints, and sometimes behaviors, and because plain text compresses extremely well, the ecosystem adopted .wrl.gz or .wrz to indicate a gzipped VRML world.
In practical terms, "compressed VRML world" also tells you exactly how to handle it: process the file as a gzip stream first, which will usually yield a .WRL you can load in VRML/X3D viewers or import into tools that still understand VRML, and a simple technical hint is the gzip "magic bytes" the header 1F 8B, which, if present at the start of the WRZ in a hex viewer, strongly suggests it’s a genuine gzipped VRML world rather than some unrelated format with a similar extension.
Opening the VRML "world" (the .WRL extracted from a .WRZ) reveals a scene graph made of typed nodes that define visuals and movement, built from Transform/Group hierarchies controlling transforms, beneath which Shape nodes combine geometry like Extrusion with appearance nodes such as Material and ImageTexture, along with typical environment elements including Viewpoint camera spots, NavigationInfo settings, Background coloring or sky textures, optional Fog, and even Sound.
Interactivity in VRML comes from Sensor nodes like TouchSensor that send events, while animation flows from TimeSensor and assorted interpolators that generate evolving values, connected through ROUTEs tying eventOuts to eventIns, and richer behaviors use script nodes written in VRMLscript/Javascript or occasionally Java, plus Anchor nodes for hyperlink-like jumps, with the spec differentiating between nodes affected by transforms and nodes that sit outside the spatial hierarchy—such as interpolators, NavigationInfo, TimeSensor, and script—making the world behave more like a tiny application than a mere mesh.
What "Compressed VRML World" means for a .WRZ file is that WRZ isn’t its own 3D format but simply a regular VRML scene file—usually .WRL—packed via gzip to reduce size back when web bandwidth was tight, so the content is still VRML text describing shapes, lights, textures, viewpoints, navigation, and simple interactivity, just stored inside gzip and labeled .wrz or .wrl.gz, a convention noted by sources like the Library of Congress, which is why tools like 7-Zip/gzip open it and why checking for the gzip signature 1F 8B helps confirm it’s truly gzipped VRML If you have any type of questions concerning where and the best ways to use easy WRZ file viewer, you could call us at the web-site. .