Google tries to prove not just Glassholes wear Glass

These days, if you see a mall cop or a tourist in a crash helmet wafting about on a Segway, you think: "Aw, that's almost sweet."

Once, though, there were those who thought Segways were the future of personal transportation. (How can they not have realized the future was self-driving Priuses?)

Google Glass is heading for a similar level of niche. The company itself blames an imperfectly thought out launch.

Perhaps it might also consider a design as grotesque as the Borgias and the effect just one glance at that design had on still sentient beings.

Still, Google isn't giving up. Having realized that too many Glass Explorers were behaving like Glassholes, the company begged them to stop.

That didn't quite work, so Google is now focusing its efforts in trying to prove that not every Glass wearer is a Glasshole. To that end, it's just released an ad featuring Sabita Malla, a researcher at the World Wildlife Fund.

Working in Nepal, Malla uses Glass to monitor the movements of rhinos. The advantage is that Glass is hands-free.

She used to take notes with pencil and paper and then enter everything on a computer some time later. With Glass, her work is halved.

Clearly, the product may have many uses in the professional world. There, the rules of behavior are (hopefully, at least) narrower and more defined.

At one point in her voice-over, Malla says that ensuring the rhinos survive isn't just about the animals themselves. It's about the community as a whole and finding the right balance between one and the other.

There are those who might imagine that this very balance is something Google might have considered in a little more depth before emitting Glass into the world.

Wearable tech should be bearable tech.

When even the likes of tech personality Robert Scoble decide that wearing Glass at Coachella is too much trouble, then you know the balance between your product and the community isn't quite right.