Purpose – Personal mobile devices currently have access to a significant portion of their user’s private sensitive data and are increasingly used for processing mobile payments. Consequently, securing access to these mobile devices is a requirement for securing access to the sensitive data and potentially costly services. The authors propose and evaluate a first version of a pan shot face unlock method: a mobile device unlock mechanism using all information available from a 180° pan shot of the device around the user’s head – utilizing biometric face information as well as sensor data of built-in sensors of the device. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – This approach uses grayscale 2D images, on which the authors perform frontal and profile face detection. For face recognition, the authors evaluate different support vector machines and neural networks. To reproducibly evaluate this pan shot face unlock toolchain, the authors assembled the 2013 Hagenberg stereo vision pan shot face database, which the authors describe in detail in this article. Findings – Current results indicate that the approach to face recognition is sufficient for further usage in this research. However, face detection is still error prone for the mobile use case, which consequently decreases the face recognition performance as well. Originality/value – The contributions of this paper include: introducing pan shot face unlock as an approach to increase security and usability during mobile device authentication; introducing the 2013 Hagenberg stereo vision pan shot face database; evaluating this current pan shot face unlock toolchain using the newly created face database.