We’re Doomed! Crypto Tracking with Doom Faces

Doom was released in 1993, and played a large part in making the first-person shooter popular. Aside from its (for the time) advanced graphics and smooth gameplay, the game featured an iconic method of displaying the player’s health, not just as a percentage but via an on-screen face. When you’re healthy, it looks rather mischievous, and becomes angrier and somewhat beaten up as damage is taken. It then advances to an extremely bloody and sad looking mug before you're defeated entirely.

VEEB Projects, as illustrated in the video below, took these facial expression sprites and tied them not to a video game, but instead to the Fear and Greed Bitcoin index, using a Raspberry Pi Zero along with a 128 x 128 RGB OLED screen. As the index goes high into the greed range, the character looks happy (grumpy?) and healthy, and as fear presides, he becomes quite beaten.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that greed is good, but in this particular context, it would certainly seem better than extreme fear. The concept could be applied to anything, whether unread emails, days until your next vacation, or even indicators relating to the broader stock market.

Installation instructions are available on GitHub, and you can find Doom sprites here.