Otherwise, there is no way for AR to really take off as a general use. It would be nice to watch your baseball game from a AR+VR (watching from the "eyes" of the players) views.
But on the larger point, I'm not sure how it's depressing. We mostly all live in similar houses and buy similar consumer products, and we have interests, work, families and hobbies that look similar to other peoples.
Maybe along the same lines of how everyone just has their face buried in a phone these days? Disconnecting from "glasses" (or eventually smart contact lenses or brain-interface) will be much the same.
It's really a personal choice. I swear a lot, and I don't like glasses hanging on my nose. Also, I like to relax and practice mindfulness during my run so without glasses I am not distracted by the details of my surroundings (the same reason i think people like filming black/white monochrome). I do recommend without glasses if you can try.
I just feel we are slowly reaching to a point where we can't be free from "vendor lock-in" even in our lives. Perhaps one day there is no physical device you need to carry around except a pair of glasses or wearing a pair of contacts.
Of course these are just my wild speculations.
We need Google Glass, Spectacles, or some equivalent AR device. All of that stuff you're talking about- projecting onto the street, onto the windshield, etc... that's setting the bar very low. We'll be able to do all of that on a per-user basis once we have AR glasses.
And those are hard problems to solve- projecting holograms into daylight without a surface? Good luck outshining the sun without overheating your tiny pocket projector. They all require unique solutions tailored to the problem and the environment they'll be used in. Why bother with that, when you can either work on AR glasses, or wait until AR glasses are readily available, which is pretty much an inevitability.