In yet another recreation of a 1997 experiment to try to get people to fall in love, Ray-Ban got a bunch of carefully chosen strangers to answer questions and look into each other's eyes for four minutes.
The brand said it hoped the subjects would open their hearts. It didn't say anything explicit about love, but creating closeness where it doesn't exist was the objective of the original Dr. Arthur Aron experiment—which The New York Times recently brought back into public discussion, spurring lots of four-minute eye-to-eye experiments, including a similar commercial from Prudential Singapore.
Perhaps inspired by the darkness of their classic shades, Ray-Ban's spots are black-and-white, moody, full of dark colors, and focus less on the redeeming intimacy of staring into a stranger's eyes than on the heart-wrenching stories that the questions elicit. Either happy stuff happened and was edited out, or the people who made the final cut simply haven't had a lot of happy moments in their lives.