On Friday night, Mr Butson was named a winner of the Young Social Pioneers program, taking out the Health and Wellbeing category for his invention of the "Vision Mate", an augmented reality device that assists the vision impaired.

"A camera takes in what the person would be seeing and, with a computerised effect, it creates an immersive reality for them to live their life," he said.

"It uses an edge definition effect, where edges are shown as black and everything else as white. People will be able to see the edges on a cup, a pen, a door, stairs, people or anything else, and react accordingly."

The invention has already won praise around Australia, and the $10,000 prize Mr Butson won in Melbourne on Friday will allow him to produce more devices with a view to distribution.

"I showed the project as a business model, to say that I could produce more devices for product exposure," he said.

"I'll be producing more, for distribution in vision clinics around Sydney."