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Nuon is a technology developed by VM Labs that adds features to a DVD player. In addition to viewing DVDs, one can play 3D video games and use enhanced DVD navigational tools such as zoom and smooth scanning of DVD playback. One could also play CDs while the Nuon graphics processor generates synchronized graphics on the screen. There were plans to provide Internet access capability in the next generation of Nuon-equipped DVD players.

Nuon originally started off as "Project X," and was featured in Electronic Gaming Monthly's 1999 Video Game Buyer's Guide. One of the Nuon's main software developers was Jeff Minter, who created a version of Tempest titled Tempest 3000 for the system and the built-in VLM-2 audio visualizer. However, the Nuon platform was primarily marketed as an expanded DVD format.

A large majority of Nuon players that were sold in fact resembled typical consumer DVD players with the only noticeable difference being a Nuon logo. Nuon players offered a number of features that were not available on other DVD players when playing standard DVD-formatted titles. These included very smooth forward and reverse functionality and the ability to smoothly zoom in and out of sections of the video image. In addition, Nuon provided a software platform to DVD authors to provide interactive software like features to their titles.

In North America, Nuon was used in the Samsung DVD-N501 and DVD-N2000 models; they also released several models in other parts of the world: DVD-N504 (Europe), DVD N505 (Europe), and DVD-N591 (Korea). Toshiba released the SD-2300 DVD player, and there are two RCA models, the DRC300N and DRC480N. The Nuon was also used in Motorola's Streamaster 5000 "Digital DNA" set-top box. However, the format has appeared to have died off. Nuon was created by VM Labs, whose assets were sold to Genesis Microchip in April 2002. As of November 2004, there were no Nuon-enabled DVD players shipping and no new Nuon software titles, meaning that it was discontinued.

Specification
16 bit 333MHz Quad core VM labs Nuon MPE(Media Processing Element, each contain 128-bytes unified cache) with 32-kilobyte share scraped cache (32-bit sram block)
MCS251 bit slice controller for background task.
32-megabyte 8-bit Fast Dram at 33Mhz, 512-kilobytes sound ram and 24-kilobytes programmable rom.
2x 3d Media GL MPE with 8-megabyte video ram
64~256MB writable rom and optional hardrive (up to 137GB)
Optical drive support DVD or CD-R

Peripherals for Nuon-enhanced DVD players included the following:

The Logitech gamepad.
Logitech Gamepad
Pro-elite controller
AirPlay wireless controller
Stealth controller
Warrior Digital-D pad
controller extension cable
port replicator to move the Nuon ports to anywhere desired

Released movies
Only four DVD releases utilized Nuon technology. All of them were released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment:

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
Bedazzled
Dr. Dolittle 2
Planet of the Apes
Released games
Only Eight games were officially released for the Nuon:

Tempest 3000
Freefall 3050 A.D.
Merlin Racing
Space Invaders X.L.
Iron Soldier 3 (later recalled due to incompatibility with some players)
Ballistic (only available with Samsung players)
The Next Tetris (only available with Toshiba players)
Crayon Shin-chan 3 (Korean-only release)