The rifle scope now gets updated for the 21st Century. What has been long been a feature on digital cameras, especially the bridge camera ones can now be a feature on rifle scopes. With the prototype RAZAR from Sandia Laboratories, a shooter can now toggle rapidly between magnification at the press of the button though it works differently from digital cameras.

It is a simple solution to an important need in shooting: the ability to zoom in and out quickly without taking their eyes off the target and removing their hands from the rifle. When time is of the essence, especially for targets moving to a new position, the push button approach can minimize the time to  zoom on the target and firing the shot.

RAZAR or Rapid Adaptive Zoom for Assault Rifles development is being led by Special Forces Operator turned engineer, Brett Bagwell:

“The impetus behind the idea of push-button zoom is you can acquire what you’re interested in at low magnification and, without getting lost, zoom in for more clarity,” Bagwell said.

He saw the need to work RAZAR as there are no existing commercial products to answer the need for a push button magnification scope. For over a hundred years, optics from shooting have been more on turning the lenses along an optical axis to zoom in and out on a target for clarity. The push button pad of RAZAR will remind you of the switch pads for weapons lights and thus operating RAZAR is a not a hard thing to do. It is more getting used to a new way of operating a rifle scope. Also, RAZAR was a response to the interest of Department of Defense for an easy to toggle compact rifle scope in 2006.

To allow this capability for a rifle scope, it uses a technology called "adaptive zoom" also developed by a Sandia engineer, David Wick:

"Adaptive zoom changes the focal lengths of two or more lenses by varying the curvature of the lenses’ surfaces to provide optical zoom without changing their overall positions relative to one another, allowing the user to view either a wide-angle image or zoom in on an area of interest with a compact, low-power system, Wick said."

Apart from military applications, the technologies used in RAZAR can also be used for other purposes that require the rapid magnification required such as binoculars, medical imaging, and even digital cameras used in mobile phones.

With the positive feedback coming from former military personnel who have tested the RAZAR now has led Bagwell to work on making it adapted for night vision and thermal imaging systems.