Project Type
Architainment/Immersive Experience
A permanent immersive environment for Crossroads Church at its Oakley campus in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Project Name
Crossroads Church Oakley, The Wonderwall.
Oakley is a 3,400-seat room and the broadcast campus location of Crossroads Church, which Outreach 100 ranked the seventh-largest church in America in 2026. Over a two-year project completed in late 2025, the room was rebuilt around the Wonderwall: a layered, moving LED environment that wraps the stage from the floor up, paired with immersive audio, theatrical lighting and real-time content. It runs four services every weekend, 52 weekends a year.
Crossroads describes the goal in one line: the Wonderwall “transforms the room into a responsive visual canvas where story, light, music, architecture, and motion work together to create experiences people can step inside.”
Design Criteria
The project started with a question from senior and founding pastor Brian Tome: “What should the next generation of the in-room church experience look like?”
Crossroads starts from a conviction that “church has historically been a driving force behind art, music and expression.” The team studied live entertainment, Broadway, gaming and virtual production to see how those disciplines could make teaching and worship more immersive. The test was never “how big can it get.” It was whether the environment helped people remember the moment and the message.
That set the brief.
Put people inside the story. A screen behind a stage tells a story at people. The Wonderwall needed to surround the stage, extend onto the floor and change shape, so the room feels like it has become the place.
No two weekends the same. The environment had to transform between services and between weekends, without rebuilding the room.
Sound and light as part of the picture. Audio and lighting had to be designed with the LED, not added after it.
Designed for the room first. Crossroads also broadcasts to eight other campuses and online, including a YouTube channel with 125,000 subscribers, but the in-room experience could not be compromised for the camera.
Project Description
The Wonderwall is built in layers. Upstage, a 105’ x 26’ ROE Vanish screen. In front of it, six high-resolution LED doors spanning 101.4’ x 24.5’, four of which move on TAIT automation. Under the artists and communicators, a 44’ x 46’ LED floor. A proscenium skirt finishes the frame. Megapixel HELIOS processes every surface as one canvas.
Because the doors move and overlap, the architecture of the stage changes with the content. The team can open a portal, build depth in layers, close the stage into a single plane or split the walls apart for a reveal. Movement is part of the design vocabulary, not a scene change.
Content is built in Unreal Engine, Notch and TouchDesigner by Crossroads’ team and partner studios, and rendered live on 29 Disguise machines. Real-time content can respond to the moment: a worship set can build, a sky can turn, a world can open behind a speaker.
Nathan Paul Taylor’s production and lighting design treats light and LED as one image. A grandMA3-controlled rig of Robe iSpiider and Forte FS, Martin MAC One and Chauvet PXL Bar 16 fixtures carries color and texture off the walls and into the room.
An L-Acoustics L2 and L-ISA immersive system places sound where the image is. It can deliver the full scale of a live band, then place a single environmental sound exactly where the eye goes.
The Spiritual Battle service shows how it comes together. The whole stage becomes a fight arena. The LED floor and walls take on the look of a ring, and even the proscenium skirt becomes the ring apron. As the communicator moves across it, an impact bursts across the floor and cracks race out toward the walls. The room isn’t watching a picture of an arena. It’s looking down into one. The same environment has also carried Red Sea, Pillar of Fire and Christmas.
GhostFrame makes the room-first rule possible. Running three slices, the LED shows the room an image designed only for the room, while the broadcast cameras capture separate layers for XR. Nobody in the seats has to look at a compromise built for television.
Challenges and Solutions
Immersion at 3,400 seats. Immersive work is usually built for small, controlled audiences. Oakley has a floor and two balconies. The layered depth of the doors, the LED floor and spatial audio were designed to hold up from the front row to the top of the second balcony.
Architecture that moves. Four moving LED doors mean content, lighting, tracking and audio all have to stay aligned as the stage reconfigures. Door movement is integrated with the media servers and processing so the image stays continuous as the architecture moves.
One environment, two audiences. The room and the camera usually force a trade-off. GhostFrame removed it, so the in-room design stays pure while the broadcast gets its own layers.
Weekly, not one-off. Most immersive installations run one show on a loop. This one runs a new story every weekend, four times a weekend. Reusable real-time environments let the creative team adapt and build on worlds instead of starting over, and redundant signal paths and failover keep it dependable.
Run by a lean crew. Diversified built Q-SYS and Ross DashBoard automation so recurring system states, monitoring and recovery are handled for the operators. In Craig Dockery’s words: “These systems allow a small weekly crew to run a production comparable to major touring or broadcast events.”
Photo credit: Crossroads Church
Equipment
LED stage. ROE Visual BP2v2, ROE Vanish, ROE BM4 and ROE Jasper. A 105’ x 26’ Vanish screen upstage, six high-resolution doors spanning 101.4’ x 24.5’, a 44’ x 46’ LED floor and a proscenium skirt. The mix of transparent, high-resolution and floor-rated ROE products lets each layer do a different job while processing as one stage.
Processing and GhostFrame. Megapixel HELIOS. HELIOS runs GhostFrame with three slices, which is the reason two audiences can be served from one stage.
Automation. TAIT motion control moves four of the six doors. Reconfiguring the stage is part of the show, not a changeover.
Media servers and real-time rendering. Disguise: 7 Gx3+ and 10 Gx3 media servers, 12 Rx3 render nodes, plus 4 Silverdraft Demon workstations. Content is built in Unreal Engine, Notch and TouchDesigner and rendered live through RenderStream.
Cameras and tracking. RED KOMODO-X 6K global-shutter cameras, synchronized with Megapixel for GhostFrame. Global shutter matters here: each camera has to capture one GhostFrame slice cleanly, and a rolling shutter would mix slices into visible banding. Three stYpe RedSpy units track the cameras, and Stage Precision handles calibration and the tracking grid.
Broadcast core. Full UHD HDR (2160p59.94 HLG). Ross Ultrix 12RU core router, Ross Acuity switchers, Barco E3 screen management, 12G-SDI distribution, Cobalt Digital signal processing, fiber transport, enterprise sync and a 100Gb network backbone for rendering, media and control.
Audio. L-Acoustics L2 with L-ISA immersive processing. DiGiCo Quantum7 at front of house and Quantum5 for monitors.
Lighting. MA Lighting grandMA3 control. Robe Lighting iSpiider and Robe Forte FS, Martin MAC One and Chauvet Professional PXL Bar 16. The rig was designed as part of the overall production design, so light and LED read as one picture in the room and expose correctly for GhostFrame cameras.
Control. Q-SYS and Ross DashBoard automation for recurring system states, monitoring and failover, with redundant signal paths and alternate control modes.
Team
Crossroads Church (Client / Creative & Production)
- Brian Tome, Senior and Founding Pastor
- Craig Dockery, Creative Director
- Patrick Buescher, Assistant Director, Experience Team Operations
- Ben Nicholson, Technical Consultant to the Project
Production Design
- Nathan Paul Taylor, Production Designer and Lighting Designer
XR, Scenic and Content
- Disguise, XR Creative Lead and XR Technology
- Original Syndicate, XR Consultant
- TAIT, Automation and Scenic Systems
- Concept Pixels, LED Integration
- ARS, Rigging
Content
- Visual Endeavors, Silent Partners, Lüz, Lightborne, Possible, Raw Cereal, Carbon for Unreal, and the Crossroads in-house creative team
Diversified (Lead Systems Integrator)
• Tim Corder, Vice President - Faith + Performance
• Dan Shivener, Project Manager
• Adrian Varner, Senior Design Engineer
• Justin Neill, Infrastructure Engineering
• Sean O’Neill, Infrastructure Engineering Support
• Riley Watson, Commissioning Support
• Mike Janes, Commissioning Support
• Nick Brandt, Commissioning Support
• Zoe Pettit, Project Coordination
• Cynthia Pollack, Sales Coordination
Key Manufacturers
ROE Visual (LED), Megapixel (HELIOS processing and GhostFrame), Disguise (media servers and XR), TAIT (automation), RED (cameras), stYpe (camera tracking), Stage Precision (tracking and calibration), Ross Video (routing, switching and control), Barco (screen management), Cobalt Digital (signal processing), L-Acoustics (L-ISA immersive audio), DiGiCo (consoles), MA Lighting (grandMA3), Robe, Martin and Chauvet (lighting), Silverdraft (workstations), Q-SYS (control and automation)