Accessing the cell phone camera to populate the profile picture field
Agreed this is not purely a Drupal question but not unrelated, a little searching got me a really good answer on HTML5 Rocks taking you through the history and methods.

Specifically go to the section on getUserMedia(), there are even examples on the page that let you test it on your browser.

To my knowledge and from my searching I have not seen any Drupal module making use of this, but there is a discussion thread on drupal.org looking into this.