Veri-Fire’s Guardian offers fast biometric access to locked gun
27 November, 2015
category: Biometrics
Veri-Fire, a firearm safety company focused on home defense, has started a crowdfunding campaign for its Guardian biometric trigger lock. The device is mounted on the weapon’s trigger guard and incorporates a spring loaded metal slider that retracts to cover the trigger.
“It’s custom adapted to each handgun. Once it’s attached, you pull the slide to the rear and it automatically locks in place,” says Matt Barido, co founder Veri-Fire. “It’s spring loaded, so it’s sitting in that compressed spring state.”
The user’s fingerprint unlocks the device in less than a second, according to Barido. The spring loaded slide then snaps forward and grants access to the trigger. Owners can store up to five distinct fingerprints in Guardian’s memory and delete them anytime. Users also have the option of punching in a 4-digit PIN on the device instead of using the biometric, which comes in handy if the finger is wet or covered by a bandage.
Veri-Fire is trying to fill the niche of enabling owners to properly securing their gun but still have fast access to the trigger when needed. Barido is quick to add that Guardian is not a smart gun – it’s a device that attaches to your gun. Testing is ongoing to make sure the device can withstand repeated firing. The engineering team assembled to develop the Guardian prototype has done work at NASA.
“We’ve been actually really pleased with the results. We haven’t experienced any sort of malfunction as a result of shocks so far,” Barido says. They’ve spent 6 years in development and plan to release the full production version next summer.
In the meantime, the company is in the midst of a crowdfunding campaign for Guardian on Indiegogo through the end of December.
The campaign “fit with where we’re at in our development cycle right now. We wanted to also understand what the adoption rate would be,” Barido says. “As our society becomes more familiar and more comfortable with (biometric) technology as a security access measure, our adoption’s only going to go up.”
The company is looking at a launch price of $199, but Guardian can be purchased now for $179 at Indiegogo.
Guardian Live Fire Test from Veri-Fire on Vimeo.