the material museum
for the digital age

every material database in the world looks like it was built by engineers for engineers. tables, spreadsheets, xml downloads. the data exists — scattered across dozens of silos — but nobody made it beautiful. nobody made it feel like walking through a museum where you want to touch everything.

niceunits changes that. we connect the world's best open material, process and color data into one beautiful, interactive, multilingual encyclopedia. not a database. a museum. for designers, architects, students, makers, and anyone who cares what things are made of.

what makes us different

museum, not database

each material is an exhibit. a rotating 3d block with the real texture. properties as visual scales, not numbers. composition as interactive charts. you discover by exploring, not by querying.

everything in one place

what it looks like (pbr textures). how it behaves (mechanical, thermal, electrical properties). what it costs the planet (co2, lca, recyclability). where to get it (suppliers, map). how it was made (manufacturing processes). all connected. no more silos.

15 languages

material names and descriptions in english, german, french, spanish, italian, japanese, chinese, korean, portuguese, dutch, polish, swedish, czech, turkish, russian. proper technical terminology, not machine translation.

open and traceable

every data point carries its source and license. the schema is open (cc-by-sa 4.0). the api is free. ai agents can query niceatoms via rest api. we never use proprietary data.

the open material alliance

niceatoms is not built alone. our goal is to unite the world's material data providers into an open material alliance — a coalition of research institutes, databases, and open-source projects working together on interoperable, beautiful material infrastructure.

we don't compete with these databases. we federate them. one search, all sources, properly attributed.

open data, properly attributed

niceatoms federates open data sources under cc0, cc-by, and public domain licenses. every data point is tracked back to its source. we are currently in conversations with multiple research institutes and data providers to formalize partnerships. details will be published once agreements are in place.

join the alliance

if you operate a material database, research institute, or data commons — we want to work with you. niceatoms provides the visual layer, multilingual translations, api federation, and ai-agent accessibility. you provide the data and domain expertise.

get in touch

who builds this

niceunits is built by andré l schauer, founder of ono systems (modular designer furniture) and snapp (modular consumer hardware), based in kirchheim bei münchen, germany. the idea was born in 2020, prototyped in 2023, and reborn in 2026 as the material museum it was always meant to be.

niceunits is built with the magi system — 65+ ai agents working together to research, curate, translate, and visualize material data at a scale no single human could achieve.