I've experimented with incrementally revealing more information about menu items as you browse the menu, including short labels and longer descriptions, hiding or shrinking unselected items so they're not as distracting and cluttered, showing the description of only the selected item, and also bringing the selected item and label and description to the cursor, because that's where the user is looking, so it's easier to read.

Menus have a title and description that's initially displayed in the center of the menu when no item is selected. Items have an icon (a 3d object), a label, and a description. Disabled items have a description explaining WHY it's disabled. This video demonstrates them (the code is 11 years old so the web demo probably won't not work, but the code might still work with some minor tweaks):

Unity3D Pie Menu Demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMN1LQ7qx9g

I've made a general purpose pie menu component in C# for Unity3D, which supports text items, image items, and 3d object items too!

I will make it available as free open source software on the Unity3D app store!

Here's a silly demo, showing a set of SimCity pie menus:

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/PieMenuDemo/PieMenuDemo.html

(If you don't have the Unity3D browser plug-in installed, it should show you a link to install it.)

They have a full set of useful notifiers so you can tightly integrate them with your application to give rich feedback during tracking (for example, modifying the 3D menu items, or previewing the effect of the menu item and distance parameter in real time, making them more like "direct manipulation").

For example, to show how you can implement feedback like The Sims pie menus with the head in the center that looks at the selected item, I've made a 3d object in the pie menu center with the webcam texture on it, so YOUR head is in the center of the menu, looking at the selected item! (That's why the demo asks for permission to use the webcam.)

The pie menu and each item has a title as well as a description. One feature I've added is the ability not only to disable an item, but also to provide an explanation of why the item is disabled! (PacMan in the demo is disabled, for example.) I wish other menus and widgets would do that -- it's frustrating when you can find an item you want, but can't figure out why it's disabled!

Another nice thing about them is that you can either configure algorithmically with an API, or with JSON data (which makes it easy to make dynamic data driven menus downloaded from a server or database), or construct them in the Unity3D editor out of objects (which makes it easier for artists to design them)!

I've made a custom Unity3D editor that lets you edit the properties, drag and drop textures and objects, edit and rearrange the items, and has some convenience commands, so you can place the 3D item objects in a circle in the 3D world, and call a command that figures out which item is in which direction by their position, and tidies them up. (That is much easier than arranging their order in a linear list of items.)

I'm going to play around with more in-world editing features, to make them easier for artists to design them.

Source code:

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/PieMenuDemo/PieMenuDemo.zip

Transcript excerpt (proofread):

[...]

This is a pie menu with eight items for SimCity, for selecting an editing tool.

Now you pop a menu up and you see in the center, right next to your cursor where you're looking, the menu title and the menu description, and then you see all the labels of the items.

The neat thing about pie menus is that every item is very close to your cursor, the target area is right next to you, and they're in a different direction, and they're very big area, so they're very fast to select from, especially when you learn them.

Now if I move towards a item, it brings it to my cursor here, and it hides all the other labels, and it shows the item description, and I can browse around the menu and read the different descriptions.

It's bringing these to my where my eyes are looking at the cursor, instead of forcing me to to move my eyes around a lot.

Now one thing is that you could disable a menu item, but it also tells you why the items disabled.

So pac-man was misbehaving, and I'm not going to even go into it. You don't want to know. So he's been disabled. Don't worry.

Now there's menus, and sub menus, for example, here we can click up a submenu.

And we get, you know, these extra items.

Notice how it won't let the labels go off the screen.

It shrinks and hides all the other things, so you can concentrate on what you're going to select.

I don't know if you've noticed, but there's this head in the middle of the menu that's looking around the menu items, kind of like in The Sims.

Now this is to demonstrate the kind of things you can do by having notifiers, that react to tracking, that modify objects in the world to show you like what's going to happen before you selected it, or just, you know, give you some interesting feedback.

Now I'm not actually moving my head around, it's just twisting this 3d object with my face on it.

That's accomplished with some notifiers, and you can also react to things, change these 3d objects in interesting ways.

[...]