Virtual environment (VE) designs have evolved from text-based to immersive graphical systems. The next logical step of this evolution is to have a fully immersive environment in which thousands of widely distributed users will be able to move around and interact. This requires a VE architecture that can scale well for a large number of participants while providing the necessary support for quality of service, security and flexibility. Current VE architectures are unable to fully meet these requirements and a new network/protocol architecture is needed. The VENUS approach addresses these problems by creating a network architecture which is scalable and flexible. We define a new architecture consisting of a transmit-only satellite/server and bi-directional links which will be capable of sustaining a wide-area virtual environment. We then offer the preliminary results of our experiments.