Orange County

The Big Picture: The West Coast’s first 3-D Imax theater will open Friday at the Irvine Entertainment Center near the El Toro Y, where the 5 and 405 freeways meet. Edwards Theaters Circuit Inc., the Newport Beach-based operator, is hoping the massive screen, with its high-tech sight-and-sound system, will find a place among Southern California’s wealth of tourist attractions and generate annual ticket sales of $5 million. The 500-seat theater features a screen that’s 6 1/2 stories tall and 90 feet wide. Patrons will don headsets that incorporate a six-channel audio system and electronic liquid crystal lenses that “blink” 48 times each second to create the three-dimensional scenes. A similar screen operated by Sony in New York set box-office records during its first year in operation.