The members of the interdisciplinary competence center “Virtual Humans” have successfully applied for an ESF early-stage researcher group. The group consists of eight PhD-students and is entitled “The Smart Virtual Worker”. From 01.01.2012 till 31.12.2014 the members will develop new methods for the simulation of virtual workers and factories to effectively overcome the problems of todays aging mankind. The Visual Computing Group will be represented by Walentin Heft, who will be dealing with world modeling and visualization.