A .WRZ file is normally a gzip-compressed VRML world, effectively a .WRL text-based 3D environment—holding geometry, textures, lighting, cameras, and sometimes interactive features—that has been reduced for easier distribution, which is why formats like .WRZ or `.wrl.gz` became common, and the practical way to view it is to unpack it with 7-Zip or `gzip` to obtain a .WRL file readable by VRML-compatible viewers, making sure related texture files stay in the expected folders.

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.

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 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.

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.

A VRML world handles interaction through Sensor nodes such as other event sensors that fire events, while animations rely on TimeSensor plus the various interpolators (Position/Orientation/Color/Scalar) to produce timed value changes, all linked together via ROUTE connections, and advanced logic is added through Script nodes using VRMLScript/JavaScript or, in some cases, Java, with Anchor nodes enabling hyperlink-style navigation, and VRML distinguishes spatial nodes in the transform tree from non-spatial nodes like interpolators, NavigationInfo, TimeSensor, and Script, giving the world an interactive program-like feel.

Describing .WRZ as a “Compressed VRML World” means it’s not its own format but a VRML world (.WRL) compressed via gzip to reduce bandwidth back in VRML’s web days, so the content remains VRML text defining 3D scene elements like geometry, viewpoints, lights, textures, navigation, and interactivity, with .wrz or .wrl.gz indicating that gzip wrapper—a convention the Library of Congress documents—which is why 7-Zip/gzip works and why spotting the 1F 8B signature early in the file strongly suggests true gzipped VRML For more information regarding WRZ document file review our own web page. .