Earlier this year, two Berkut 540 aircraft -- codenamed Red 1 and Red 2 -- raced down the runway of Santa Monica Airport and climbed into the California skies. As the two planes flew over Ventura County, a KC-46 Pegasus Tanker came into the pilots' view. The tanker flew adjacent to Red 1, and the pilot navigated into position so the KC-46 could refuel the aircraft while Red 2 observed. However, anyone looking up from the ground would have only seen two planes in the sky. The third plane that "refueled" Red 1 wasn't real -- it was generated using augmented reality.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch's roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you'd like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: A TechCrunch-commissioned report has found damning evidence on Microsoft's search engine. Our findings show a massive failure on Microsoft's part to adequately police its Bing search engine and to prevent its suggested searches and images from assisting pedophiles. Unity, the widely popular gaming engine, has pulled the rug out from underneath U.K.-based cloud gaming startup Improbable and revoked its license -- effectively shutting them out from a top customer source. The conflict arose after Unity claimed Improbable broke the company's Terms of Service and distributed Unity software on the cloud.

It's difficult to stand out in the battle-royale genre right now. Fortnite's bright and zany combat has attracted over 125 million players, while PUBG stands firm with its slower, military-inspired shooting. Blockbuster franchises such as Battlefield and Call of Duty are readying modes inspired by the pair's breakout success. If you're a newcomer like Automaton, a 40-person studio based in Cambridge, England, how do you differentiate and, more importantly, persuade people to switch from the competition? Mavericks: Proving Grounds is a hugely ambitious game.

As tens of millions of gamers log on every day to play games such as Fortnite, developers are hoping their creation will become the next megahit. Worlds Adrift has elements of Fortnite - a "bright, brash multiplayer shooter" game - combined with World of Warcraft and has been spawned by a developer already used to turning simple ideas into viral smashes. However, it's also hard to sum up in a few words, which may be why Bossa Studios recently decided that the best way to promote their game was to invite a few fans and journalists to play it while dangling from a crane 45 metres above Chelsea College of Art. The stunt made more sense that it seems. The game drops players in a massive multiplayer online world of floating islands, and tasks them with building sky ships to move from one to another, exploring new islands, constructing shelters, and sparring with other fleets for honour, profit or just a laugh. Bossa Studios previous hits include a physics-led comedy hit Surgeon Simulator, in which players are tasked with carrying out complex surgeries through a deliberately obtuse control system, and the mobile version of story-driven Thomas Was Alone about a blue rectangle that gains sentience.

Government planners who want to transform their congested metropolises have to do more than set up a few thousand extra sensors and plug them into some clever software. They need to build a simulation of their city, complete with virtual moving cars and "living" people, to test the software and the artificial intelligence that might make the decisions that help keep it running smoothly. Improbable has been selling access to its simulation-building platform, SpacialOS, to government planners for a few years now, and on Friday it announced a huge injection of cash that will allow it to expand to more clients, and with more features. The London-based startup has raised $502 million from a small passel of investors led by Softbank. Improbable will use the money to hire more staff for its office in Farringdon, London and in San Francisco, including distributed-systems engineers and "lots of game talent," the company's founder says.

The idea that the next British unicorn (the term for a startup valued over $1bn) could be the developer of a cloud-computing platform for video games seems, well, improbable. But that's what's happened, following an enormous $502m investment in London-based Improbable from Japan's SoftBank corporation. In a single transaction, the sum – which is for a minority stake in the company, with its three founders, Herman Narula (29) Rob Whitehead (26) and Peter Lipka (28) still holding the majority of shares – took the firm into the big league. Improbable's core product is a middleware platform, a piece of software used by developers to fulfil a specific role within a program or service. Named SpatialOS, it lets game-makers build multiplayer virtual worlds that can handle more players online at the same time than typical programming techniques allow. Classic massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, such as World of Warcraft or Destiny, rely on techniques such as splitting players up over different servers, so each cluster only has to deal with a few thousand players at once, or "instancing", throwing groups of friends into their own unique versions of the world where they don't have to deal with strangers at all.

That's the call from Google as it gets behind a tiny British startup called Improbable. Founded by two Cambridge graduates and backed by $20 million in funding from the venture capitalists at Andreessen Horowitz, Improbable offers a new way of building virtual worlds, including not just immersive games à la Second Life or World of Warcraft, but also vast digital simulations of real cities, economies, and biological systems. The idea is that these virtual worlds can run in a holistic way across a practically infinite network of computers, so that they can expand to unprecedented sizes and reach new levels of complexity. So far, the startup has shared its technology with just a handful of coders and companies. But today, Improbable joined forces with Google to offer its creation, called SpatialOS, to anyone who wants it.

Editors at the MIT Technology Review recently weighed in with their annual review of the world's 50 Smartest Companies. This list celebrates the most effective pairing of innovation and business across the globe. For the first time, more than 20% of MIT's picks rely on artificial intelligence to support their business at a fundamental level, somewhat redefining what it means to be a truly "smart" company today. It's working on speech recognition intelligence called Deep Speech 2. This reduces the chance of accidents on autopilot by 50% relative to the safety record of human drivers, according to CEO Elon Musk. Now, Tesla automobiles come off the assembly line "future ready" for complete self-driving.

Editors at the MIT Technology Review recently weighed in with their annual review of the world's 50 Smartest Companies. This list celebrates the most effective pairing of innovation and business across the globe. For the first time, more than 20% of MIT's picks rely on artificial intelligence to support their business at a fundamental level, somewhat redefining what it means to be a truly "smart" company today. How many of these 13 artificial intelligence leaders are you already using? It's working on speech recognition intelligence called Deep Speech 2. This reduces the chance of accidents on autopilot by 50% relative to the safety record of human drivers, according to CEO Elon Musk.

Editors at the MIT Technology Review recently weighed in with their annual review of the world's 50 Smartest Companies. This list celebrates the most effective pairing of innovation and business across the globe. For the first time, more than 20% of MIT's picks rely on artificial intelligence to support their business at a fundamental level, somewhat redefining what it means to be a truly "smart" company today. How many of these 13 artificial intelligence leaders are you already using? It's working on speech recognition intelligence called Deep Speech 2. This reduces the chance of accidents on autopilot by 50% relative to the safety record of human drivers, according to CEO Elon Musk.