A .WRZ file is effectively a gzipped VRML world, where a .WRL 3D scene—built from plain-text instructions describing geometry, materials, textures, lights, and occasional animations—has been reduced in size for easier sharing, which resulted in the convention of calling such files .WRZ or `.wrl.gz`, and the usual approach is to unzip them with tools like 7-Zip or `gzip` to obtain a .WRL file that VRML-supporting viewers can load, with textures appearing correctly only if their referenced image files stay in the proper folders.
A straightforward check is verifying whether the file starts with the gzip indicator 1F 8B, a strong sign of gzip compression matching the WRZ format, and a common misunderstanding is mixing it up with RWZ, which belongs to email filtering rule backups, so if the file came from email migration it may be RWZ, whereas anything from a 3D or CAD workflow is usually a true WRZ.
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 gzip-compressed 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.
Should you have virtually any inquiries about where by as well as the way to employ WRZ file extension, you can e mail us in our own webpage. Practically, the label “compressed VRML world” is your cue to treat the file as gzip before anything else, letting you extract a .WRL compatible with VRML/X3D viewers, and a dependable indicator is the presence of the gzip magic bytes the hex signature 1F 8B at the start, strongly confirming it’s a real gzipped VRML file and not another format that happens to share a similar extension pattern.
A VRML “world” (the .WRL obtained after decompressing a .WRZ) generally contains a structured scene graph describing what you see and how you navigate, using Transform/Group nodes for hierarchical transforms, Shape nodes blending geometry—Box—with materials and textures via Material/ImageTexture, plus common extras like Viewpoint camera positions, NavigationInfo navigation rules, and bindable world settings such as Background, Fog, and Sound.
In VRML, interactivity stems from Sensor nodes such as event-trigger sensors that emit events, animations come from TimeSensor and multiple interpolators that generate timed value changes, and ROUTEs wire eventOuts to eventIns, while Script nodes using VRMLScript/JavaScript (and sometimes Java) add advanced behavior, with Anchor nodes enabling jumps to other worlds or viewpoints, and because VRML separates spatial transform nodes from non-spatial elements like interpolators, NavigationInfo, TimeSensor, and Script, the result behaves like a lightweight interactive application rather than a static mesh.
A .WRZ being a “Compressed VRML World” means WRZ is just a VRML .WRL file gzipped for smaller transfers, keeping VRML’s text-based description of meshes, textures, lighting, viewpoints, navigation settings, and simple interactions intact, but delivered in gzip form and named .wrz or .wrl.gz as noted by the Library of Congress; this is why decompression tools like 7-Zip/gzip open it easily, and why the gzip magic bytes 1F 8B help confirm it’s authentic gzipped VRML rather than an unrelated format.
