Virtuality is a concept with a long history in philosophy, its most notable recent version being that developed by French thinker Gilles Deleuze.
[1] Deleuze used the term virtual to refer to an aspect of reality that is ideal, but nonetheless real.
"[4] Deleuze argues that Henri Bergson developed "the notion of the virtual to its highest degree" and that he based his entire philosophy on it.
At the same ontological level as "the possible" (i.e. ideally-possible) abstractions, representations, or imagined "fictions", the actually-real "material", or the actually-possible "probable", the "virtual" is "ideal-real".
[9] Among Deleuzians, Alexander Bard & Jan Söderqvist even argue (in agreement with Quentin Meillassoux) in Process and Event that virtuality must be separated from potentiality, and consequently suggest the potential of the current as the link between the virtual of the future and the actual of the past.