Only in the ruins of post-apocalyptic cities would the absence of living entities be appropriate, whereas real environments are filled with characters, whether they're alone, in groups, or congregating in large crowds. Therefore, the simulation of populated environments is one of the most active and expanding areas of computer graphics research today. There are two main reasons for this. First, owing to the problem space's complexity, many research challenges remain to be solved. Second, a huge demand exists in many application domains (for example, games, movies, and architectural design) for convincing and scalable populace. Virtual populace is an extension of crowd-modeling research in computer graphics that encompasses activity selection, graphics portrayal, implementation architectures, and perceptual features. This special issue features articles addressing these and related issues.