They are explicitly not. They want to abolish the screen. They want real, touchable objects to be imbued with dynamism.

From their FAQ:

"Is Dynamicland augmented reality (AR)? It depends what you mean by augmented reality. Dynamicland is primarily about working with actual physical objects that everyone can see and touch. Glasses and phone-based AR is usually about 'holograms' floating in space that only the person with the device can see. It is a central tenet that all people who come in to Dynamicland share the same reality. This enables social cues like pointing, eye contact, and shared attention which are essential for people to be fully present with each other."

https://dynamicland.org/faq/

AR is not VR. I think that VR will certainly enable all these behaviors, eventually. Except in a virtual space, instead of meat space. The behaviors and ideas Dynamicland are advocating should work just as well in both.

And while their points ring true for the current iterations of AR-as-personal-assistant, I don't see why a networked AR where everyone shares the same annotations would work any differently. Isn't that what their projectors are doing, after all?

It's not just the social angle — projections in VR and AR aren't tangible, whereas physical objects imbued with dynamism are tangible. Here's a really good article on why this matters so much: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

Now, once we have a holodeck, where the virtual objects are made tangible, your points will hold. But until then, tangibility is a key difference (and perhaps not the only key difference, but this should suffice for now).