The Crossroads’ Oakley campus stage was designed to serve live worshippers, regional campuses, and online viewers at the same time—without favoring one audience over another.
At its Oakley campus in Cincinnati, Ohio, Crossroads Church is known for building worship experiences that feel culturally current and technically excellent. But its newest initiative goes beyond a typical stage upgrade. It is the most ambitious production project in Crossroads’ history—and quite possibly one of the most ambitious technology-driven worship environments ever attempted in a North American church.
It began with a question from Brian Tome, senior and founding pastor of Crossroads Church: What should the next generation of the in-room church experience look like?
Ben Nicholson, technical consultant to the project, says Tome challenged the team to research where live, in-room experiences are heading and to reassess how the church’s worship environment could better serve unchurched people and those hesitant to engage with church at all.
“We went well beyond traditional church production references and started looking at live entertainment, Broadway, and virtual production.” — Ben Nicholson, technical consultant
From there, Nicholson says the team intentionally looked beyond traditional church production references. “So we went through an exercise of looking at what people were doing in live entertainment and Broadway and XR and virtual production, gaming...to try to put together what would be a proposal to basically create a media-rich auditorium experience.”
Crossroads leadership responded decisively. “It was a very aggressive response and slightly terrifying, if I’m honest,” Nicholson says.
From there, the Crossroads team assembled a carefully selected group of suppliers, manufacturers, and integrators to pursue a project unlike anything the church—or much of the industry—had attempted before.
A Room Designed for Multiple Audiences
Crossroads approaches worship with a clear understanding that it serves more than one audience at a time. Each weekend includes a live congregation in the room, attendees at multiple regional campuses, and viewers engaging online or on demand.
Patrick Buescher, assistant director of Experience Team Operations at Crossroads, says the scale of off-site engagement shaped nearly every technical decision. “We have more people on the other side of the lens than we do in the room,” he says. “So how we care for those audiences well becomes critically important.”
Nicholson frames the challenge succinctly: “How do you do all these things and have it matter to somebody that’s actually not there? And that in itself is the core of the problem.”
After years of research and iteration, the project came online in late 2025. For the live audience at Oakley, the Wonderwall is the most striking visual change—but much of what makes the system truly groundbreaking is intentionally invisible.
The Wonderwall
At the center of the Oakley campus is a layered LED architecture the team calls the Wonderwall. Rather than a single monolithic display or a typical LED wall, the system is made up of overlapping LED surfaces that move and reconfigure, allowing the stage environment itself to change shape.
Nicholson says the team deliberately avoided building “the biggest LED wall you could possibly afford.” Instead, the goal was to create a dynamic environment capable of transformation.
Craig Dockery, creative director at Crossroads, says the motivation was never about spectacle for its own sake. “And it’s not for the sake of trying to chase trends or anything like that,” Dockery says. “But it’s just that idea that if someone’s going to go to a concert and see something that blows their mind or they’re going to go to a Broadway show and see something like that, why wouldn’t we use that same technology or use those same tools to present the Gospel to people?”
He adds that the intent is focus, not distraction. “If it’s just to get people’s attention so that they can actually hear what God is saying or is doing, then I think it’s absolutely worth it.”
Every service at Crossroads must work for the room, regional campuses, and online viewers— simultaneously.
At Crossroads Church’s Oakley campus, the stage environment reflects years of research into how immersive design can support worship without becoming a distraction. By combining layered LED architecture, real-time media workflows, and broadcast-driven tools typically reserved for studios, the church created a space that serves live worshippers, regional campuses, and online viewers at the same time—while keeping the technology itself largely invisible to the in-room congregation.
Ghostframe and Multi-Audience Content
One of the most advanced workflows in the project is GhostFrame, sometimes referred to as frame replacement. The technology allows camera-specific content to be embedded within the LED display’s output so cameras capture a different image than what the human eye sees in the room. The extremely high refresh rate from the LED display means each frame of video can be subdivided into multiple “slices” – with the duration of each individual slice on the screen determining whether it is visible to the audience, camera, or both.
Buescher explains the practical implication. “We’re using the ability to hide an image in plain sight that is different than what the live, in-person audience sees,” he says. “What that means is that you are now creating essentially two different video outputs—and we can actually do that twice. So three different video images simultaneously on one screen.”
The capability opens massive creative possibilities for different content to be sent live from the Oakley campus to the church’s remote locations and to the live stream audience. But it also introduces significant complexity. Dockery says the church has been intentionally cautious. “We haven’t even used it on a weekend yet,” he says, “because the learning curve is still pretty insane for this.”
Tim Corder, vice president of faith and performance at Diversified, lead integrator on the project, adds important context. “Nothing like this had ever been done before in front of a live audiences in a room anywhere near this size,” he says. “GhostFraming is a thing that’s done in broadcast...watch any NFL football pregame or postgame show in a studio, and they’re using GhostFrame-type technology.”
GhostFrame technology embeds camera-specific content within the LED system’s output, enabling parallax motion and broadcast-optimized visuals for online audiences. Meanwhile, the live congregation sees a stable, artifact-free image, with the system’s complexity intentionally hidden from view.
The difference, Corder says, is tolerance. Broadcast studios can accept visual artifacts that a live congregation cannot. “When you’re in front of a live audience, you can’t have that weirdness --- for example, the parallax shift, often used in XR filmmaking,” he says. “Typical artifacts of virtual production environments is screen flicker and the parallax shift that on screen talent learns to adjust to. But when you’re using this technology in front of a live audience, those artifacts are extremely distracting, if not sickening,” he says. “The single largest challenge of this initiative was to execute the storytelling benefits while minimizing those potential distractions as much as the technology will allow.”
Disguise Media Servers and Real-Time Worlds
A key enabler of the Wonderwall ecosystem is the partnership with Disguise and their media servers. Beyond playback, the platform allows Crossroads to use RenderStream, enabling real-time Unreal Engine graphics to be rendered directly to the LED canvases.
Rather than pre-rendering video content, the team can operate inside fully navigable 3D environments, adjusting perspective, lighting, or time of day instantly. This real-time capability supports a more responsive creative workflow and allows the environment to evolve alongside the message.
Disguise was instrumental in enabling GhostFrame content within this environment. At the same time, the live audience at the Oakley campus remains unaware of the complexity behind the scenes, experiencing a clean, stable visual environment.
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Instead of a single monolithic LED wall, Crossroads designed the Wonderwall as a dynamic system capable of transforming throughout a service, allowing the stage visuals to shift as the message unfolds.
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Vendor Ecosystem and System Design
Buescher played a central role in assembling the project’s technology partners, bringing together Diversified, Disguise, Megapixel, LED manufacturers, camera partners, and automation vendors under a unified vision.
GhostFrame’s success depends heavily on the LED processing chain. “GhostFrame is a trademarked video processing technology developed by Megapixel VR and supported by its HELIOS LED processing platform,” Corder explains. “Megapixel and RED cameras worked together to develop this technology.” That integration influenced camera selection and informed the church’s approach to reliability and redundancy.
With a vertical resolution that surpasses both HD and UHD formats, the Wonderwall demanded a ground-up rebuild of Crossroads’ video infrastructure. “We had to replace the video plant to move to 4K,” Buescher says. “We needed to change everything in that pipeline to operate at 12 gigabits per second, whereas we were at one and a half gigabits per second before.”
The church adopted Ross Video Ultrix routing and switching, and added a Barco canvas management layer to mitigate latency and provide failover in case of media-server issues.
Motion, Automation, and Physics
The Wonderwall is not static. Its movement relies on precise rigging automation, provided by TAIT, to ensure repeatable positioning critical for XR-style alignment and camera tracking.
Environmental factors add another layer of complexity. “We now know how much snow load was going to affect LED walls,” Buescher says, noting that deflection under load can reach several inches. The team continues to work through these realities as part of ongoing system refinement.
Integration Under Real-World Constraints
Diversified served as systems integrator, tasked with unifying broadcast video, LED canvases, media servers, cameras, tracking, and control into something the church could operate week after week as well as project managing the entire implementation among all of the various manufacturers and partners.
Corder says the project allowed no pause button. “There was no ability to mock up and test ahead of time,” he says. “You’re basically flying the plane while you’re building it.”
Even defining completion was unfamiliar territory. “We had to create a checklist of all of the functionality that was expected,” Corder says. “We had to go through a process of showing Crossroads, yes, the system can do this...here is the amount of latency you’re getting.”
The LED Floor as a Teaching Tool
One of the system’s most impactful successes has been the LED floor, which has emerged as a powerful teaching tool.
By placing contextual visuals beneath the communicator, the floor supports storytelling without distraction. In a recent teaching from the book of Daniel, geographic maps appeared underfoot, helping the congregation follow the narrative visually while keeping the focus squarely on the message.
Not a Blueprint for Every Church
Crossroads is careful to emphasize that this project is not intended as a universal model. “We are not interested in growing Crossroads Church at the cost of other churches,” Buescher says. “We are not competing with other churches.” He adds, “We do recognize that we are competing with other things people could be doing with their time.” Corder echoes that sentiment. “We’re not doing this for the sake of being cool,” he says. “We’re doing this for the point of the most important message in the world that the church is trying to convey.” For Crossroads, the Wonderwall and the systems behind it are tools—demanding, expensive, and still evolving—built to serve a specific mission: reaching people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ who might never otherwise step into a church, helping them listen, engage, and return.
Immersive Audio That Serves the Room—and the Broadcast
At Crossroads Church’s Oakley campus, audio is treated as an essential part of the immersive worship environment, designed to support engagement without calling attention to itself. While much of the visual system commands immediate notice, the audio strategy works more quietly—shaping how the room feels rather than how it performs.
At the center of the design is L-Acoustics L-ISA, an immersive audio platform that distributes sound naturally throughout the space instead of projecting it from a single focal point. By placing vocals and instruments intentionally across the room, the system improves clarity and consistency while reducing the sense of volume often associated with large worship environments. For congregants, the experience feels present and enveloping, yet unobtrusive.
To support that immersive approach long-term, Crossroads has specified dedicated mixing platforms for both live and broadcast audio. A Digico Quantum852 console is on order to manage the in-room mix, providing the flexibility and control required for complex worship services and special events. For the live stream and broadcast mix, the church has selected a Lawo mc296 console, allowing the online experience to be mixed independently of the room.
By separating live and broadcast workflows—and designing audio with intention rather than impact—Crossroads reinforces its broader goal: creating an environment where people can listen, engage, and respond, whether they are seated in the room or watching from afar.
Manufacturers:
Disguise media servers
Stage Precision
Stype
RED Camera
Ross Video
ROE LED Walls
Megapixel
TiMax Tracking/Focusrite
L-Acoustics
TAIT rigging
Digico consoles
LAWO consoles
Vendors & Integrators:
Disguise
Nathan Paul Taylor
Diversified
Concept Pixels
Atlanta Rigging Solutions
Consultants and Content Partners:
Visual Endeavors
Scott Millar
Silent Partners Studio
Marcus Bengtsson
Bright!
Able Cine Trivner
